Writ on Water
by Lomonaaeren
Summary: Sequel to 'Letters from Exile.' HPDM slash. Harry and Draco's new relationship is tested by a new case, people Draco would prefer to forget, and the mysterious notes from nowhere. Who or what is the morning star? Eighth fic in the Cloak and Dagger series. COMPLETE
1. Silence in the Darkness

**Title: **Writ on Water

**Disclaimer: **J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this for fun and not profit.

**Pairings: **Harry/Draco, mentions of Ron/Hermione

**Rating: **R

**Warnings: **Angst, violence, gore, possibly sex, ignores the epilogue.

**Summary: **Harry and Draco's new relationship is tested by a new case, the appearance of people Draco would have been happy to forget, and the mysterious notes that appear everywhere around them. Who or what is the morning star?

**Author's Notes: **This is the eighth story in the Cloak and Dagger series, about Harry and Draco as Auror partners hunting Dark wizards. The previous stories are "Invisible Sparks," _Hero's Funeral, _"Rites of the Dead," _Sister Healer, _"Working With Them," _This Enchanted Life, _and "Letters From Exile." This one probably won't make much sense if you try to read it on its own. Its title comes from Keats's epitaph, and it will probably be twelve or fifteen chapters. As with the previous stories in the series, it will be updated every Wednesday.

**Writ on Water**

_Chapter One—Silence in the Darkness_

Harry woke with a gasp. In the silence of the night, a collar of invisible, hissing serpents seemed to surround his throat.

Harry reached up and tore at the air with one hand, while fumbling for his glasses with the other. He paused with another sharp gasp when he realized there was nothing in the air around his neck, and only skin under his hands.

After a few moments during which he hushed his breathing as much as possible, he realized no one was near. He found his glasses, shoved them on his face, winced as the eyepiece of one nearly poked him in the ear, and then found his wand. He blinked as the _Lumos _Charm sprang to life, both because it was slow and because it filled his vision with painful images.

_Maybe I ought to start sleeping with a torch in my room, if only because it would make me wake up faster._

He leaned against the pillow and looked around. He knew he would have felt different sensations if the wards had awakened him, but sometimes strange things happened, either thanks to his curse scar or being hit so much with Dark magic during his youth, and if he kept quiet and still, he might figure it out.

Nothing moved, and no one spoke. But then Harry felt a sensation deep in his belly, tugging like a fishhook buried in his intestines. And he had encountered one of those once, when hunting a particularly clever and ruthless Dark wizard with Ron. Harry grimaced and turned on his side, trying to ease the pull.

It seemed to float up his body and compensate for the new direction. Harry frowned. Now it felt more like the tug of a Portkey. He had never heard of someone able to Portkey someone out of their houses without an object, but a few years ago, he would also have argued against forcible Apparition, or people who could turn others into their slaves without the Imperius Curse.

He stood up, and the pull moved around his body again, this time located more in his chest. It also started to get more painful again the longer he stood there. Harry shook his head. He doubted he would get back to sleep if he didn't go and see what the pull wanted.

He took a few moments to shove his feet into Auror boots and his awkward arms into a dressing gown, and then he gritted his teeth and created a timed Patronus, which would go to Draco in case he didn't return within half an hour. He probably should have gone to summon Draco, but the pull didn't feel like it would go in that direction, and Harry didn't want to wait longer, in case it ripped his heart out of his chest or something.

In the end, the jerking was strong enough that Harry simply whirled in place and Apparated, trusting it to take him where he needed to go.

He arrived in a dim and dusty room with a wobbly gasp, and looked around at the walls in some suspicion. He relaxed a little when he recognized that it was one of the upper rooms in Grimmauld Place. Behind his own wards, he could hold off anyone who tried to attack, even if they had come up with this clever way to lure him here.

The tug came to life in his right shoulder this time, and Harry turned upstairs. The dust puffed up around him as he walked, and he cast charms that cleared his throat and settled it with a slight shower from _Aguamenti _. The corridors around him seemed to sigh now and then, settling from the unexpected weight of a wizard tramping along them.

By now, Harry was wondering if someone had managed to break in and steal a Black heirloom. That would explain the tugging sensation; he had been summoned as head of the Black family to deal with the crime.

But instead of the cabinets or dusty attics still crowded with things Harry had never looked through, the tugging led him straight to the tapestry. There, it vanished. Harry, who had braced himself against the pull, blinked and rested one arm against the wall to hold himself up while he yawned and studied the tapestry.

It looked the same as it always did. Harry studied the line that drew Narcissa Black's marriage to Lucius Malfoy first, and yes, Draco was there, his name glowing reassuringly safe and familiar. Next, he looked at Sirius's black mark, right under his parents' names, and nothing had changed there, either. Harry spent the longest time looking at that part; it made sense that the message would be especially urgent if anything had happened to the man he had inherited the house and its responsibilities from.

But nothing looked different, and no matter how long Harry waited, the tugging didn't come back. He frowned and shook his head, reaching out to run his fingers down the tapestry. The cloth felt the same, too, and no magical beast lunged out of it to bite him.

At last, after staring at it some more, Harry gave up and turned back to go to bed. Sometimes he didn't like the inheritance Sirius had left him; for one thing, he would have given it all up any day to have his godfather back. Or given it up to Draco, if he'd ever showed any sign of wanting it. But he didn't think Draco would ever take charity.

But this was the weirdest thing yet, he thought drowsily, when he was back in bed, comfortable and warm and with his head resting at just the right angle. All right, so the Black magic had thought something was wrong with the tapestry. But how could it be, when Sirius and Narcissa and even Sirius's awful mother were in the right place? And those were the only Blacks that he might have noticed vanish from the tapestry.

He yawned, and pressed further into the pillow, and fell asleep still half-braced for the mysterious tugging to begin again.

* * *

"One for you."

Draco raised a hand and caught the tossed file without bothering to look up from the other one he was reading. He was friends—of a sort—with Auror Macgeorge, but it never did to give her an idea that she was more important than whatever you were doing at the moment.

He reached the end of his first file and rolled his eyes. This wasn't a potential twisted; it was a fantasy made up out of too much toadweed and someone's clever glamour charm. He scribbled the recommendation for a pair of Hit Wizards to go and soothe the woman who believed she had seen the dead get up and walk on her street, and wished he could scribble the recommendation for someone to rap her hand smartly with a wand, too. It was too bad there was no such charge as "wasting an Auror's time."

"How do you do that?"

Draco glanced up. He had assumed, when she made no more noises for attention, that Auror Macgeorge had gone for tea, but no, instead she leaned against her desk and watched him with a fascination that, frankly, made him a little uncomfortable. He covered it by leaning down until he could place the file into the drawer that would Vanish them for the present, and call them back when they were wanted—that was, when someone happened to be walking in the general direction of the Head Auror's office.

"Catch things without looking?" He sat back up and crossed his legs, smiling at her in a way that didn't use his eyes. "I _was _a Seeker, you know."

"Not like Potter was one," Macgeorge said, and stretched as lazily as a cat in the sun. "I heard of him even though he never played professionally."

Draco snorted. "And he probably couldn't play now, with as many old wounds and enemies as he had. Someone would shoot a Stunner from the crowd, and that would be the end of him."

"Why do you follow him so?"

Draco raised a second eyebrow to join the first. "Pardon? I don't know what you mean. If someone told you that Potter _controls _me, or anything else similar, then they've misled you. There is nothing tame about me."

Macgeorge gave him her own non-smile. "No one has to tell me what's plain on your face to see. The way your eyes follow him. The lost way that you've looked for his letters during his holiday. The way you orient on him the moment he walks into the room." She paused, staring at the wall, and then added generously, "Of course, he does the same sort of thing to you, so you can at least argue there's a mutual regard there."

Draco wanted to freeze, or at least crumple one of the endless sheets of parchment on his desk. So someone had noticed. Well, he shouldn't have thought that his partnership—more than assigned partnership—with Harry could remain secret for long.

Macgeorge was studying him with a cool curiosity that made him think she wouldn't immediately report their mutual infatuation to Okazes and demand reassignment for one of them, at least. And it would be silly to deny what she had seen, especially when they were the only ones in the bloody huge Socrates Corps office for the moment.

Draco leaned forwards and lowered his voice. Macgeorge drifted imperceptibly closer. _Good. _"I don't know if you've paid attention to him—" _and you shouldn't pay too much, _said the sharpened claws in his smile "—but he's fit."

Macgeorge nodded. "And if you only ever watched his eyes or his arse, I might believe that," she murmured. "But you watch his face, as well, and the way he walks, and you _always _know what he looks like even when you don't glance up from your desk. I guarantee you that even Isla has noticed it, and she doesn't notice a lot."

Draco tilted his head. "And you're not afraid that your partner's lack of observational skills will get you killed someday?"

Macgeorge shrugged. "We're not on a case at the moment. She's not here to be offended. I want to know."

"Are you surprised because he's not a pure-blood?" Draco asked, switching tactics. So, he couldn't deflect her, and she wouldn't believe an attraction on the physical level alone. Well, if he was her, Draco might not, either. But her surprise still seemed excessive. "Or because it seems such a common fantasy, to be with the Boy-Who-Lived? Or because you believe that he's not a good Auror, and you know that I can't stand incompetence?"

Macgeorge's smile was knife-edged. "I didn't know that last about you, but I'm not surprised. But knowing it _does _make me curious. Potter is in trouble continually with Okazes and with the press, and even with bloody St. Mungo's. How can you stand to be around him, knowing he might drag your own career down?"

"Have you noticed," Draco said, deciding that he might as well shift the ground under _her _feet, too, "that we don't have as many visitors or cases here as some of the other Corps do? As far as I'm concerned, this is where my career landed me, and there's no other place that I'm likely to go. What I did in certain numbers of my cases made the Ministry wary of me, and I think the same thing can be said of Potter."

_And you_, rang the words in the clear air of the huge office without having to be said.

Macgeorge took a step towards him, but just then, her partner came in, complaining about the flavor of the tea, as usual. Macgeorge turned to soothe her, but kept her eye on Draco, and her focus never wavered from him.

Draco shrugged and turned back to his paperwork. That was as close as he intended to come, at the moment, to sharing with her what he and Harry had discovered about twisted on the Alexander case. He might have said more, but her hostility at the moment, no matter its origin, wasn't something he particularly wanted to confront.

Then the door opened, and Harry stepped in. He was yawning and scratching that mop he called hair back into place. Draco felt his heart beat faster to see him, and it could even have been because of those gestures, not in spite of them.

He sat up straighter, and caught Macgeorge smirking from the corner of his eye. Draco ignored her. If she tried to wield this knowledge against him, he knew something about her that she didn't realize he knew, and he could crush her pretensions with little more than a flick of his tongue.

"Good morning, Draco, Nicolette, Isla," Harry said. He had taken to first names all around lately, as if he imagined that would keep the fact that he called Draco by his first name from the notice of their co-workers. Macgeorge snorted into her cup and turned back to her work, shaking her head. Harry, now rooting through papers on his desk the same way he had rooted through his hair, didn't notice.

What caught Draco's eye was Rudie's faint smile that she lifted her teacup to cover. Did _she _reallyknow something? Draco had not realized how fast and far word of his liaison with Harry Potter might spread.

Of course, possibly he and Harry had been putting out signals that others had simply picked up on first. Draco knew that Harry was not the most subtle of people, and Draco sometimes felt he was becoming less so as he worked with him.

"Have a case," Harry said, succinctly, and extended a file across the space between their desks. Draco, damning the audience in his mind, reached over and took it, and let his fingers brush against Harry's on the way.

Harry caught his eye, and flushed. Draco smiled back, and his smile could convey half a dozen meanings at once, before he opened the file. Public relationships had some few advantages, it seemed.

The photographs in the file did not depict bodies, as he had expected. Most of the time, they weren't called in on cases without murders, as twisted were mad and tended to reveal themselves that way. Instead, the pictures showed a series of neat, hand-written notes, none of them with the words large enough to read. Draco murmured an imprecation against Ministry photographers in general and tapped his wand against the pictures, enlarging them enough to read.

Harry was still chattering on. "All of them reference the morning star. The woman whose house they're in, Karina Jourdemayne, doesn't know why. She says they're in her handwriting, but she can't remember writing them, and she's strengthened her wards with no result."

Draco leaned back in his chair. "I see. And why have they assigned this case to Socrates Corps?" He lowered his voice and the file at the same time, and, when Harry looked up, forced eye contact.

Harry's eyes widened, and then the lids lowered over them in a way that Draco thought a dead man would have found sensual. Luckily enough for him, he didn't think Harry was interested in anyone else, and Draco was certainly not interested in letting others have time to find Harry and attract his attention.

"The f-file says," Harry said, and paused to swallow. Draco heard the distinct neighing sound of Macgeorge's snicker. Harry must have heard it, too, because he lifted his head and narrowed his eyes, but then turned back to Draco and spoke in a firmer voice. "Jourdemayne had a twisted in her family. Her sister. She fears that she might be going mad herself, or that the ghost of her sister has somehow come back to haunt her."

"Mmm." Draco turned back to the file, satisfied that at least Harry couldn't ignore the tension that hovered between them. "And it seems she has a connection to the Head Auror as well. Donated to him when he had problems cleaning his house up from a Boggart infestation?"

"I would never presume to suggest that that had anything to do with it," Harry said, in a screechy, innocent tone.

"Of course not," Draco said, and stood, nodding to Macgeorge and Rudie. "See you later."

Apparently because she had decided that they were no longer interesting, Macgeorge had turned back to her work, but Rudie looked up and waved to watch them go. Draco met her eyes with what he only knew later was a challenge, probably, instead of the calm and cool gaze that he would have wished to show.

Rudie dipped her head and spread her hands, and then faced her work, as well. Draco told himself he was getting paranoid, and left the office in stride with Harry. When they weren't thinking about it, he had discovered, it was actually easier to fall into, this apparently perfect match, march for march and step for step.

"What is Macgeorge smirking at us for?" Harry murmured, when they were in the privacy of a lift heading down to the Atrium.

"I believe she thinks I have a plot of some kind," Draco said, and folded his arms, shaking his head until Harry looked at him again. "Why else would I put up with a partner who's not only not pure of blood but continually in trouble?"

"And likely to be in more trouble later," Harry said. "So. What did you tell her?"

"Oh, some rubbish," said Draco, and reached out and let his fingers trail down Harry's elbow. "Nothing like the truth."

Harry turned the most becoming color. His face tended to be pale with exhaustion or dark with anger; Draco preferred this blooming red, which was more of the shade of life, at least.

"Thanks," Harry said, turning his head away.

He didn't say whether he was thanking Draco for the touch or the words or the defense from Macgeorge, and Draco didn't care which it was. He kept his hand in place on Harry's arm until the lift jerked to a stop and its doors opened, exposing them to many, and too-curious, eyes.

* * *

"I'm just so _worried_."

Harry was telling himself that some people couldn't help it if they were born with annoying voices, and that the woman in front of him had good reason to be worried. Notes appearing out of nowhere, with unknown references and no echo in his memory, might make him think he was going mad, too.

But couldn't she do it a little more _quietly?_

Jourdemayne paced the center of her drawing room, a large, warm place she had shown them into when they first arrived, and which they hadn't yet left, although Draco had tried several times to suggest that they go and tour the rest of the house. Portraits crowded the walls, some of them with features only mildly similar to Jourdemayne's; here and there stood stuffed animals, sleek and shining greyhounds and what Harry recognized as a Grim. The furniture had been chosen for cost and not comfort, and no one with an eye to color had advised her that bright green and that particular shade of blue didn't go together. In other words, everything about her room screamed "Half-blood trying to claim pure-blood status."

Jourdemayne herself was a tall woman with black hair who might have been striking if she wasn't in the middle of a fit of fear. Her hair flowed behind her in thick tangles that reminded Harry of Bellatrix, and she wore a set of silky pyjamas and a wool blanket—the only thing on her bigger than her hair—draped over her shoulders. She hadn't offered to go get dressed, either; she had only paced back and forth, both hair and makeshift cloak flying, and recited all the details they already knew from the file.

Harry looked at Draco. Draco pursed his lips and looked back, and for a moment, they had a silent row about who exactly was going to try and direct the witness's attention to what they were _really _here for, new details. Harry tried to tell Draco with his eyes that he was pure-blood and she would probably like attention from him better, and Draco replied that Harry was half-blood, like her, and the Great Harry Potter besides.

That last argument settled things. Harry sighed, turned to Jourdemayne, and tried to make his voice as pleasant as possible when all he really wanted was for her to sit down and stop making him dizzy. "Ms. Jourdemayne. I'm sorry to cause you distress, but I have to know. Have you done research on the morning star references yourself? That's one thing the file didn't mention."

"Of course I have!" Jourdemayne came to a halt, looked between them, and then seemed to finally decide that Harry's attention was a fine enough compliment. "I've looked in dozens of books, and found references to planets—especially Venus—and gods and weapons and Lucifer. Of course, I haven't looked in many _Muggle _books," she added a moment later, as if realizing what the last word might reveal.

Harry nodded. "And you can't remember your family having a feud with anyone by the name of Morningstar?" He thought that was the simplest explanation, really, and it sounded like it could easily be a pretentious pure-blood name.

Jourdemayne opened her mouth to respond, and then shrieked and pointed a finger. "Look! _Look!_ There's another of them! That wasn't there when you walked into the room!"

Harry spun around and aimed his wand, and sure enough, a scrap of paper fluttered from a table near the fire that had been empty a few minutes before. After a glance with Draco and a trembling nod from Jourdemayne, Harry ventured towards it. He still cast several spells before he picked it up.

But it was an ordinary piece of parchment, like all the other notes that Jourdemayne had allowed them to see and handle. And it looked like them, too, in that it had the distinctive flourishes on all the letters like g's and b that Jourdemayne seemed to typically put in her writing.

This one had a variation of the message that had already become wearily familiar to Harry after a few hours of investigation: _Beware the morning star. Appearing here seems strange, but it has a deeper purpose._

Harry shook his head. "Could 'appearing here' refer to the appearance of the note?" he asked, turning to Jourdemayne. "Do you think a version of yourself from another world or time could be sending these notes to you?"

Out of the corner of his vision, he saw Draco roll his eyes, but Jourdemayne latched on eagerly to his explanation and began talking about it, and that had been all Harry wanted. He was feeling a stirring of excitement and interest despite himself. If someone had used Dark magic to transport the note into the room, Draco's flaw should have reacted, and if someone had intended to kill Jourdemayne soon, Harry's should have. And Dark magic and murderous intent were two of the most common marks of the twisted.

This might not be a twisted. It might be just an ordinary, if intriguing, mystery. Harry was looking forward to one of those.

_And if we don't have to kill anyone this time, I will be very relieved._


	2. Confusion in the Air

Thank you again for all the reviews!

_Chapter Two—Confusion in the Air_

Draco tapped his wand against the newly-appeared note and murmured a spell that would probably get him sacked from the Aurors in most Corps while Harry comforted Jourdemayne. Of course, Draco did watch that from the corner of his eye, too, so as to ensure that there was not _too _much comforting happening.

But no, so far Harry only had a hand on Jourdemayne's shoulder and his head close to hers while he whispered soothing words, his other hand gesturing in the air. Draco knew exactly what his eyes looked like when they burned with intensity, and this wasn't it.

_Not that I've had much chance to see them burn with intensity myself, when he got back from his holiday three days ago._

Draco bit his lip and concentrated on the parchment again. Perfectly ordinary parchment, of the kind that many wizarding households would have around and which could be bought by the ream in any shop in Diagon Alley. He held it up to the light while he waited for his spell to take effect, and then shook his head. No clues in the weave of the paper, or a secret watermark crouched in one corner.

The spell took effect then, and the parchment turned blue for a moment, the color spreading out to the edges of the sheet and making it look as if it were made of considerably more expensive material than it actually was. Draco turned his back slightly on Harry and Jourdemayne, out of necessity. He didn't think someone who thought other people could believe she was related to Hilda Moonborn was any threat, but Harry might see the spell, and Draco would prefer not to get into a row about it right now.

The blue color trembled, and then deepened to a sapphire shade. Draco held his breath, waiting for it to darken all the way to black.

It didn't. It stayed that deep blue color for a long, stubborn moment, and then vanished. One of the advantages of charms such as this was that they left no physical trace behind, and unless someone was ready to use _Priori Incantatem_ on the caster's wand or actually saw it, it was hard to tell.

Draco smiled. _Interesting. No one made it appear with a Dark spell, then, but it has been around Dark magic. I wonder what? _

He cast a few more indicator spells, but none of the others had any effect. So. Subtle Dark magic, and not a kind that had been used to make the paper actually appear of thin air, or write the words, or to make this kind of message appear and nothing else.

Yes. _Interesting. _

He turned around when Harry softly called his name, to find that Jourdemayne was nodding in front of her fire. Harry had convinced her to take a Calming Draught, as Draco saw after a glance at her. He raised an eyebrow at Harry and indicated the doorway out of the room with a little tilt of his head.

"What do you think?" Harry asked quietly when they stood in the corridor. "Jourdemayne doesn't have any involvement with it herself, I don't think. She was too afraid when she was speaking to me—kept jerking her head around as if another one of them might appear at any moment."

Draco shook his head. "No. I don't think she does. But the note has been _around _Dark magic, interestingly enough." He tapped his fingers against the edge of the parchment, and watched the way it bent. There was nothing out of the ordinary in that, either. The sheer mundaneness of it made the mystery far more intriguing to Draco than it would have been without. "One of the spells I used showed that."

If Harry had been the cat that he sometimes resembled, Draco knew, he would have had his ears pinned back. "In a victim's _house_?" he hissed. "Draco, they might sack you for that."

"And you think that we aren't expected to use Dark magic in the pursuit of our duty?" Draco stepped closer to Harry and lowered his voice, though, just in case that Calming Draught hadn't sent Jourdemayne straight to sleep. "You haven't used it yourself?"

"Not in a victim's house," Harry muttered, but he passed his hand over his brow, touching his scar the way he did when something wearied him. "Anyway. Sorry. It's not important. Could you tell how long ago the note had been around or touched by someone with Dark magic?"

Draco shook his head reluctantly. There were times he would have liked to claim expertise that he didn't possess—any chance to make Harry's eyes light up and lock on him was a good chance—but Harry would only find out the truth later, and Draco would feel horribly embarrassed about the very idea of deceiving him. "That particular charm has no way of letting me know something like that."

Harry grunted and fiddled with his battered gold watch on its chain for a moment. A present from the Weasleys, Draco had surmised. Harry kept an awful lot of rubbish around or on him because of its connection to his friends. "All right. Any idea where we go from here? I don't have any. I thought Jourdemayne could tell us more than it turned out she could."

Draco curled his lip a little. "I had no idea of getting much help from her," he said, and Harry shot him a sideways glance. "But yes, I think I know where to go. There's a morning star reference that she missed."

Harry smiled. "I'm not surprised. Where is it?"

* * *

Harry locked his legs. They were at the entrance to Knockturn Alley, and his skin crawled as a thick odor came blowing of the alley's mouth, curling around his face and polluting his lungs, thick as smoke. "_Draco_. You can't be serious. I don't know if Okazes could overlook going in there even for Socrates Aurors."

"Since when did you worry about breaking the rules?" Draco shone against the dirty wall of the alley that he half-leaned on (after having cast charms to protect his cloak and robes, of course). "Seeing this morning star for yourself in its natural context will make it real for you."

"I learn perfectly well from words," Harry said, and heard the plaintive note in his own voice with surprise. "You could just describe whatever you were going to show me, and I think I would know what you were _talking _about."

Draco brought his head slowly around until his eyes locked on Harry, and Harry shivered from the impact of his gaze. He hadn't meant to sound quite so whiny, and especially not as whiny as the way that Draco examined him made him sound to his own ears.

"I want to show this to you," Draco said, voice low and eyes as strong as they had been all along. Harry didn't think he'd shifted a muscle in his body since leaning back, either. For Draco, that really was the equivalent of pacing a room while throwing his arms in the air. "I want you to share this with me, and know that I'm revealing something I would otherwise have kept a secret. I want that. Why are you worrying so much about rules when everyone _around _you knows that you _don't_?"

Harry winced. The answer to that question would sound stupid said aloud, but then again, he didn't have another one. "Because I don't want you to get in trouble," he mumbled. "Ever since—I did a lot of thinking on my holiday, okay? A lot of thinking that didn't wind up in the letters to you, even. I want you to have a good career as well as a good partnership with me. And you can't if you're constantly in trouble because I am. So I'm trying not to be as much of a fuck-up."

Draco stared at him. The stones in the alley wall seemed to stare at him. The world around him seemed to hold its breath. Harry did, too, in solidarity and because he was waiting for everyone to tell him how stupid he was.

Then Draco said, in a voice of strange gentleness, "Thank you, Harry. But my career is in my charge, not yours. If I was concerned about that, I wouldn't have brought you here. Or I would ask you to stop, or I would find a different partner. And none of those things is happening at the moment, or didn't you notice?"

A smile worked its way across Harry's face, entirely unbidden. "Wanker," he muttered. "I ought to know that you couldn't say something romantic without _also _saying something that would deprive the entire thing of any romantic feeling it had."

"Let me say something romantic, then." Draco still didn't move closer, but his heated voice seemed to blow all around Harry's ears. "Do you know how jealous I was watching you with Jourdemayne earlier?"

Harry gritted his teeth. This was the kind of thing that he might want to hear, but not in the middle of Knockturn Alley. Or at the entrance to it, or whatever. He shook his head.

"You don't know," Draco said, watching him, his head half-lowered, and his hand extended. "But I was, Harry. You have no idea how much. The way you put your head close to hers? That's the kind of thing I want to do. The way you touched her, your hand on your shoulder as if you were doing more than comforting her? That's the sort of thing I want to do."

Harry shuddered, feeling as though someone had reached out and brushed fingertips all over his skin, especially up and down the back of his neck and around the corners of his jaw. "You can," he said. "Just not in public." He couldn't help looking over his shoulder, wondering when someone would come around the corner, see them there, and react. Sure, they weren't in Auror robes, and they wore hooded cloaks, but he thought criminals hardened enough might be able to see what they were from their stance.

"I wondered when you would begin to put those kinds of restrictions on me," Draco said, and his eyes and tone both had the brittle fragility of ice. "Yes, I wondered."

Harry rolled his eyes. "Look, I don't mind if you don't that other people will know about us," he said. "But—I thought that you probably wouldn't want to reveal that in front of people in Knockturn Alley, or use our real names here."

Draco nodded at him. "That is thoughtful of you," he said. "It is a real kindness, and it is a real problem."

Harry sighed when he saw the way that Draco still stared at him. "And not a solution for you," he said. "Why not?"

"Think about it," Draco said. "But privately. As you say, we shouldn't be standing here, out in the open where anyone can see us, and with real names."

He walked towards Knockturn Alley as if he did it every day. For a moment, that prompted Harry to wonder about what he did with his time off, and then he rolled his eyes at himself this time and followed. Draco wouldn't do anything that could endanger his career as an Auror, and spending time in Knockturn Alley that he couldn't connect to an investigation would.

_But so does spending time with me. _

Harry bit his lip and wondered if he could trust Draco to be so careful with his career after all.

The usual scuttling people passed them, and the usual shadows, and the usual feeling of grime clung to Harry's skin. He always wanted to take a shower if he came here—and he had, more than once, when chasing a suspect and when he had wanted to find something to resurrect Lionel.

After the Alexander case, at least, every trace of _that _desire was gone. Harry focused his eyes ahead and smiled grimly, wondering if he should be happy that it had taught him something worthwhile. Everything else was the kind of thing that would increase his responsibility and his vulnerability.

_Only if you let it trouble you._

Draco walked ahead of him, with the easy stride of someone who knew the place and wouldn't be disturbed. A few times, he paused in front of a shop and appeared to examine the sign or the wares shining in the dim front windows, before he sniffed and proceeded. Harry kept tensing, until he realized that Draco was creating a cover story for what they had really come to the alley to find. He sighed and shook his head at himself. There were things he was good at as an Auror, including keeping his latest partner alive, but subterfuge and stealth would never be second nature to him. Everything he knew about that was hard and dearly learned.

Draco finally slipped into a doorway that Harry barely saw, the roof of its shop projected so much above it. Harry followed, and found that Draco was knocking on a heavy door made of darkened oak, hardened to an iron-like consistency. Harry reached out curiously with a spell and found wards that made his teeth ring and several gargoyle-like heads on the door come to life and turn towards him with extended tongues and gleaming eyes.

"Don't do that," Draco said quietly, without looking at him. "Show some respect. Belinda will expect you to."

Harry nodded and didn't ask who Belinda was, because he thought he would find out soon. Then the door rang with a shake of a delicate bell above it and opened, and a voice straight out of the best fairy tales cackled, "Who's come to the Sign of the Morning Star, then?"

Harry started and looked at Draco. Draco tipped his head to the side, subtly indicating a wavy starburst in the center of the door, as he replied.

"Two petitioners who seek your advice, Belinda," Draco said, and half-bowed his chin, so that his hair fell around his face. It looked more attractive than Harry would have thought it would if someone had asked his opinion, and he bit his lip and blinked, reminding himself that they weren't discussing things like that in public. "Will you grant us a moment of your time?"

The witch stood studying them, or so Harry assumed; he couldn't actually see into the dim shop. He heard the sound of fingernails, or maybe claws, tapping, and then Belinda sighed and leaned forwards so that Harry could see a glimpse of dark red hair.

"Advice?" Her voice had changed, without so much of the cackle. "That's all you have for me, Malfoy?"

"This time," Draco said, calmly looking up and into the darkness, "yes."

Another sigh, and then Belinda stepped back and said, "You'd better come in, then."

Draco walked in without hesitation. Harry just made sure his wand was at his side—Belinda apparently knew Draco, and under his real name, too, but she didn't have any reason to trust _him_—and followed.

The shop revealed had walls and counters, crates and boxes, curving out like vines in a jungle, ready to trip anyone up that they could. Draco moved like someone who knew his way around, and Harry followed him. The floor seemed to tremble and shift underfoot, too, for all the world like a swamp. Harry wrinkled his nose, and the smell of rot and decay came to him strongly enough to make him choke.

But Belinda was watching him, and she might have a hooked nose and dark eyes and be ugly enough to make Harry stare, but the last person Harry had known like that was Snape, and he had turned out to be more intelligent and important than Harry had ever suspected. So he bit back his immediate response, nodded to her, and let Draco do the talking.

"I want to know what you're doing here," Belinda said to Draco, moving behind a counter and touching something that made the smell stronger. Harry tried to imagine what it could be, and came up with a bloody corpse. He grimaced and didn't cast a charm to take the smell away only because, as Draco said, it probably wouldn't be "respectful." "If you don't have something to sell me—"

_More things I didn't know about Draco, _Harry thought, and worked not to stare.

"This is better," Draco said. "Did you know that a certain customer of yours is receiving notes warning her against the Morning Star? Notes that appear from nowhere, in her own handwriting, but without her having any memory of writing them? And notes that have been around Dark magic?"

Belinda went still, eyes scanning Draco's face as if she assumed that he must be lying because most people who came to her shop did so. Then she shook her head. "No customer of mine would be careless enough to leave the signs lying around," she murmured.

Draco sighed. "You know that I don't like to use other people's names in this place, Belinda, but I feel I must. The name Jourdemayne, for example."

Belinda's fingers twanged apart, and then she expelled a sigh and said, "She's never bought anything from me directly. I would have remembered someone like her."

Harry finally accepted that this was the questioning of a witness, in a way, and silently set himself to remember what was happening here. Draco had to conduct the interrogation, and he had a better memory than Harry did, but Harry might notice something that Draco couldn't as long as he was focused on Belinda's expressions and gestures.

"Someone like her?" Draco lowered his head and folded his arms on the counter. "With her pretensions to pure blood, you mean?"

Belinda shook her head. "Those other pretensions of hers is what I meant."

Harry had no idea what she was on about, but Draco either did or was skilled at pretending that he did. He leaned back and gave Belinda the faintest hint of a smile. "Ah," he said. "I hope that I can count on you not to admit just _anyone _to the Order."

Belinda snorted. "There are many who have the ambition, but few who have the sense or the skill or the devotion, Malfoy. No, candidates are rare enough that you can be sure I won't prostitute my knowledge."

"Even for the sake of a few quick Galleons?" Draco was smiling at Belinda, but she was blind if she didn't see the edges to the smile, Harry thought. "I'm surprised, Belinda. I thought the ruling force in your life was money, not devotion."

Belinda straightened and threw her head back, eyes fastened on Draco. Harry was glad, again, that he had half-drawn his wand, although he didn't think he would need it. Surely Belinda wasn't foolish enough to attack someone like Draco, who she must know had training in the Dark Arts as well as ordinary battle skills.

_Then again, this _is _Knockturn Alley. She probably has skill in the Dark Arts, too._

"Jourdemayne did not come to me," Belinda articulated, stressing her words hard enough that Harry wouldn't have been surprised to hear them hitting his bones like pebbles. "She came nowhere near this shop. If she bought something of mine, she bought it from someone who sold it _once _it was in their possession. That is all I know."

Draco stood regarding Belinda for a few minutes more, in absolute stillness and perfect silence. Then he swept a bow that made her start despite herself, probably because it was sudden. Hell, Harry nearly cast a curse before he realized that it was just Draco's melodramatic nature asserting itself.

"Thank you, Belinda," he said. "I believe you. And I am glad that you have not betrayed the Order. I don't think I could…stand it if one of the few sources of stability in my life decayed like that."

Belinda narrowed her eyes, but didn't respond. Harry wondered if she was standing on her dignity as best she knew how, or simply didn't know what to say.

He would have bet on the latter, if someone had asked him, not that anyone would. Draco in this mood was extremely hard to understand. Harry had certainly never seen him in it since they became partners.

"Come, then, Horace," Draco added over his shoulder, to Harry, and turned to leave the shop. Harry watched Belinda's eyes flickering over his disguised form, her lips moving as she committed the name to memory, and bit his lip again to avoid bursting out in laughter. _Trust Draco to give away "information" that's utterly useless and won't aid the untrustworthy person it's spoken in front of in tracking it down._

And then Harry stopped wanting to laugh, although Draco was sensitive enough to his moods that he glanced at Harry curiously as he walked past him.

_That's a common Auror tactic, Harry, one that you've used yourself, not one that requires a great display of cleverness. Why would you react to it as if it did? Draco is attractive and smart, certainly, but not so much more than anyone else. _

That was when Harry began to suspect that his feelings for Draco were deep enough that they might interfere with the cases. Which he didn't want. There was the fact that keeping Draco safe was his bloody job, for one thing, and for another, he still didn't know that they agreed about the Socrates Aurors being twisted.

To try and distract himself, and because he should know, he asked, the minute they were out of the alley, "And what is the Sign of the Morning Star? Or the Order? I heard you mention both."

Draco held up one hand, and then reached out and took Harry's arm, Apparating them both to a Diagon Alley Apparition point. Harry accepted it without comment, and waited to speak again until Draco had escorted them both into the Leaky Cauldron and ordered several scones and cups of tea hot enough to boil Harry's brains if he swallowed it without sipping.

Then he looked at Draco, and maintained the look through the swirling steam of the tea, until Draco sighed and lowered his cup.

"It's a group that studies the more powerful spells, including the ones that the Ministry has classified as Dark," Draco said quietly. Harry noticed that he was careful not to mention the Morning Star by name even here. "And they make sure that everyone has copies of the most important books. They have to be copied by hand, usually; you can't print them or create copies with spells, it doesn't work. That's their major work. Sometimes they sell artifacts or the less rare books. That's Belinda's business."

Harry nodded slowly, and concealed dismay at his thought that Draco was involved with this group. It was really none of his business, as long as Draco didn't let anyone else from the Ministry know. "And you thought that perhaps these people were responsible for the notes Jourdemayne is receiving?"

Draco snorted with what Harry thought was bitterness. "It would fit with the general aura of mystery that Belinda and others like to throw around the proceedings."

"But you believe Belinda when she says she's not," Harry finished.

"She treats it like a religious calling, even more than a business," Draco said. "She wouldn't betray the principles for anything. Now, there's plenty of other things she would do for enough money, and someone easily could have bought something from her and given it or sold it to Jourdemayne—something she doesn't remember, something that's driving her mad. But Belinda despises people like Jourdemayne who, she was hinting to me, only play at the Dark Arts, or attempt to cast the spells without understanding them, without approaching the whole thing as a structured discipline with steps and initiations and all that rot. That's what she meant by her pretensions."

Harry found his shoulders dropping a burden he had barely realized he carried. "So there might not be a twisted here after all, just an artifact."

Draco looked up swiftly. "Why do you sound so happy about that?"

Harry stared into Draco's eyes. Were they going to have this conversation now? It seemed they were. "Because I don't want to kill any other twisted if we can avoid it," he said simply. "Knowing what we know about them."

Draco's nostrils flared, and his face turned red enough that Harry would have predicted a stroke if he hadn't known the cause. Then he stood and slapped both his money and his cup down. "We'll have a talk about this back in our office," he said.

Harry stood up, not looking away from Draco at all, never flinching. Yes, they would talk about this. And Harry would defend his side.

If he and Draco and Macgeorge—and maybe the other Aurors in their Corps, who knew?—were or had the potential to become twisted, then it was wrong of them to hunt down other people who were while remaining under the protection of the Ministry itself. Harry had changed a lot over the years, but he wouldn't do something so unjust.

Even if he suspected he and Draco were about to have their first real row over it.


	3. Arguments in the Office

Thank you again for all the reviews!

_Chapter Three—Arguments in the Office_

Draco noted absently that there were no other Socrates Aurors around when he strode into the office with Harry following right behind him. _Good. _Draco didn't particularly feel like explaining himself right now, and that included to people like Macgeorge who would smirk at him over his relationship with Harry.

He made sure that Harry was through the doors, and then cast the charm that locked them and Silenced the corridor outside. If the others showed up, well, they would have to understand that he and Harry were having a private discussion right now, and they could come back later. It wasn't as though they couldn't Summon their files if they needed them.

_A private row, more like._

Draco grimaced as he spun around. So it was to be that, so what? Harry was the one who insisted on it, acting as though the twisted they hunted, and should probably be hunting in this case, were kin of theirs.

Harry looked over his shoulder at the doors as they locked and then back at Draco. There was a sullen little flame burning at the bottom of his eyes.

Draco frankly didn't care. It was better than the silence that he thought Harry might have retreated into. He took up his station next to his desk and crossed both his legs and his arms. "Taking precautions so we won't be interrupted," he explained coolly. "I want to hear what you have to say without any breaks except the ones _I _make."

"You mean," Harry said, and paced towards him, stopping several feet away—the optimum distance to hurl any number of curses from, Draco couldn't help but notice—"the ones where you scream and swear at me because you can't think of anything better to do?"

Draco took a long, slow, deep breath, and made himself release it as slowly. Part of this was his whole fault. He really _shouldn't _have talked about screaming at Harry as if he was a child. He nodded to acknowledge a hit and then took the chair behind his desk, spending a few moments gazing in abstraction at the files there before he leaned back and shook his head. "All right. What did you want to speak about with regard to the twisted? Why will you be so relieved if we don't have to kill one this time?"

Harry took a seat in his own chair, and crossed his legs so that one knee stuck up almost to his chin, and steepled his fingers in front of him. Draco blinked at him, then frankly stared. It was a posture he never would have associated with Harry, but now that he thought about it, he didn't see why not. Harry couldn't always be the fiery hothead that Draco was more familiar with, the one who got himself banned from St. Mungo's on a regular basis (and sometimes, it seemed, would have got himself banned from the Ministry, except that they were more patient with the Chosen One). And now he had lost the advantage of surprise, because he hadn't spoken while he stared, and Harry was speaking.

"You know that we're our own special kind of twisted," he said. "We have the Dark gifts, and there are times that we've both acted less than sane."

"I don't know what you're talking about," Draco said coolly. "I have always acted with rationality and not let my emotions and desires lead me astray."

Harry stared at him. "Draco, normal, absolutely rational, emotionally-controlled people don't see Mind-Healers."

Draco flushed. Sometimes he managed to forget about Healer Estillo, who was not a pressing kind of person, when he wasn't actually attending sessions in her office. "I—that's not relevant right now," he said.

"It isn't?" Harry met his eyes and snorted. "For a short time, you were a full-blown twisted yourself, with companions. Yes, that was under the influence of someone who was a twisted, but you know that you can go that way. I think we need to acknowledge that we're closer to them than we think. And when we use Dark Arts, that brings us closer still. We hunt twisted who've studied the Dark Arts and lost their minds to them, for the most part. What makes you think that we can go on studying that kind of magic forever and not fall ourselves?"

Draco added another layer of Silencing Charms to the ones on the doors, and then put some on the desks, too. That probably wouldn't stop the Ministry hierarchy from listening to this conversation if they really wanted to, since Draco hadn't covered even half the room, but it made him feel better. "Because we limit our study," he said. "And because we have partners to watch our backs and tell us when we're using too much of them."

"If friends and family being concerned about twisted worked to turn them aside, then we wouldn't have any of them at all," Harry said, his voice as flat as a mirror. "Alexander had a mother who was still concerned about him. Alto had the _gift _for making friends, and despite their concern for her, the other Healers hadn't actually stopped her working in hospital. And we talked to Larkin's mother and sister ourselves. They did the best they could, but they couldn't stop him from studying the Dark Arts, either."

Draco was tempted to add another layer of charms, but he controlled himself, and shook his head with a faint, condescending smile on his lips instead. He _knew _it was condescending, but that was part of the test. He wanted to make sure that Harry would shut up in sheer frustration and listen to him, instead of continuing with that line of argument, because the only one Harry would convince with it was himself.

Harry snarled at him.

"I meant partner in a different sense," Draco said, and linked his arms behind his head, leaning back against the desk and gazing meditatively up at the ceiling. It had nothing interesting about it—in fact, since Harry had come back from his holiday, Draco had found little more interesting than his face—but it served the purpose of making Harry focus on him, and that was all to the good. "Someone who watches our back, someone who knows about the danger and can prevent us from becoming twisted."

"I couldn't do that when you became Alto's victim," Harry said. "I never realized what was happening until it was too late."

Draco sniffed and made a dismissive motion with his hand. He knew that he couldn't hope to dismiss the whole legacy of that particular twisted as cavalierly, but at the moment, he didn't care. The important thing was to make Harry _think _he could, and to keep him from realizing how cold that incident still made Draco when he thought of it. "I don't think becoming her victim was anything like the ordinary process of becoming a twisted. There would be other warning signs."

"Do we know that?" Harry leaned forwards and rubbed his hand across his face, as Draco saw from the corners of his uplifted eyes. "We know so little about twisted. We didn't even know that they might not have all of those five traits that the Ministry defines them by until we met Alto, and then we learned the blood of other twisted might make them so, and we _still _can't wake Unspeakable Retror up even though Alexander is dead and that _should _mean his stolen magic went back to him. I just don't think that we know as much about twisted as we think we do, Draco. Not convinced at all."

Draco turned his head away with a faint sneer. "I see no point in playing with the knowledge that you claim we don't have," he snapped. "What matters most of all is that we won't become the same."

"How do you know that?" Harry leaned forwards and swung his hands between his knees, his eyes fastened to Draco. "How the fuck can you possibly know that? We don't know _anything _about them." He took a deep breath that sounded like it hurt. "And that means that we don't know if there might be a way out there to help them, either."

Draco bared his teeth at the wall. "Don't."

"Don't what? Tell the truth?" Harry rubbed his forehead again. "You sound—Draco, sometimes you sound like someone who's more interested in denying the truth than in helping it along."

Draco turned his head slowly to face Harry. He realized that he was shaking, and that he felt as if the words were a lance stabbed through him. The only other time he had felt like that was when his parents had opposed him becoming an Auror, and told him that he could never come back if he made that decision.

_Of course. This is what happens when you let someone close to you, when you love someone. _

He thought of his parents, and he thought of his dead partner, Kellen, and then he sent the thoughts flying off into outer darkness. He had made his choice to continue being an Auror despite those losses, and he would not let them disarm him now.

"This is my _job_," he said quietly, and felt a little satisfaction as he watched Harry wince from the words. "This is the thing that I was assigned to the Socrates Corps to do. If it's wrong, then it's on the Ministry's head, and not mine."

* * *

Harry stared at him. Draco stared back, tilting his head slightly, haughtily. He didn't know what about those words shocked Harry as well as hurt him, but he believed in them, and would abide by them.

_Merlin. He doesn't see—he truly doesn't understand the difference, or even why it's important that there is one._

Harry swallowed, and spoke the simple truth. All the elaborate arguments he had prepared wouldn't make sense to Draco, not if he didn't accept the basic morality behind them.

"If we don't have to kill the twisted, what we're doing is murdering people. And we're the ones who are in contact with the twisted, and the ones who know the differences between them and the official definition. It's up to us to make the decisions and change things and pay attention to the truth. Otherwise, we're just killers."

Draco watched him with slitted eyes, his fingers tapping on the desk behind him. Harry waited. He didn't know what one could say to that, because it was the _truth_ and he thought even Draco ought to care about murdering people—he hadn't wanted to kill Dumbledore when he was a student, and he hadn't changed _that _much—and so he would have to change his mind.

Then Draco said, "Even if we are like the twisted, we are still different from them. We don't kill people. We don't torture them. We don't send our companions after them and take their magic away."

"That's only because we don't have companions," Harry said, leaning forwards. "And not all the twisted that we hunt do, either. That means that we should think more closely about it and—"

"You're not listening to me," Draco said, continuing in that cold, low, unalterable voice that Harry thought Aunt Petunia had used when she got angry enough. "There are more differences between them and us than you think. For one thing, we're still sane."

"But we _could _be the same," Harry said, and folded his arms, glaring at Draco. "That's enough reason to rethink this policy of hunting them down and killing them all the time."

Draco watched him for a moment with his eyebrows arched. Then he said, "And we could, conceivably, decide tomorrow that we wanted to be rich and become international jewel thieves. Does that mean that none of us should ever come near Galleons or jewels again?"

"We don't have flaws related to that," Harry hissed, glaring at him.

Draco shrugged. "One could also argue that we have _our _particular flaws because they're connected to the marks we've collected throughout our lives. I couldn't do what I do now without the Dark Mark, which makes me think the flaw isn't inherent in me, and that I wouldn't have developed it without that. And I don't know that you would have your visions of murders without that curse scar on your forehead, either." His eyes flickered over as if he was considering the scar on Harry's forehead for the first time.

"We don't know that," Harry said. "Maybe they manifest through those things, but that doesn't mean we wouldn't have them if we were unscathed."

"Unscathed." Draco nodded slowly. "I like that word better than unmarked. I think I may use it from now on."

"Come _on_," Harry said, when he realized that Draco didn't intend to say anything else, and stood up to lean forwards. "Will you listen to what you said? All the other twisted don't have flaws connected to marks. I think that we have them because they're expressions of the Dark magic that would be useful to us. I want to save people, and the visions give me the means to do so. You probably hoped at one point that you could be sensitive to Dark magic so you could know when you were around people who used it, and that happened."

From the way that Draco's face turned the color of milk and his nostrils flared, Harry knew he had come closer to the truth than Draco hoped he would. But still he stubbornly shook his head, and fastened his hands on the desk behind him. "You don't know that—"

"And you don't know that the magic is connected to the scars that we bear, either," Harry snapped back.

"Exactly," Draco said, and drummed his hand down hard in the middle of the desk. "We don't _know_. There's simply too much about this that we don't understand. The Ministry's definition of twisted isn't perfect. Fine. We know that. Leah claimed we shared some traits in common with the twisted. Fine. We know that. It doesn't follow from there that it's true, or that we're exactly like them."

Harry clenched his fists and turned away. He really thought he might punch Draco if he kept on looking at him, and it was made worse, not easier, by the fact that he was probably in love with him. "Fuck," he whispered. "So you're going to keep right on slaughtering them instead of trying to find some way to help them."

"Because they're dangerous," Draco said, in a tone that really did make Harry come close to hitting him. "The same way that keeping a dragon is dangerous, and fighting Dark Lords is dangerous, and trying to capture a hydra alive is dangerous. It's _inherent._"

"I've fought a Dark Lord," Harry pointed out, clinging to his patience with both hands. "I've kept a dragon—or helped Hagrid keep one—for a while. And it may be possible for us to split duties, you know. You could hunt down the twisted who really need to be killed, and I could talk to the ones who seem as if they might be more sane than the average."

That got him a stare from Draco that was so stupid Harry felt the need to say something. "What?" he asked.

"You won't do that," Draco said, sounding calm, if you ignored all the suppressed emotions churning in the back of his voice.

"Why not?" Harry cocked his head, feeling as if they might be able to move past this argument if he could understand Draco's objections. "I'm offering of my own free will, and I know that speaking to the twisted who might be more normal is not something you want to do—"

"You won't do it because I won't let you."

Harry paused with one hand still rising in front of him. Then he shook his head, and smiled pleasantly, and said, "I'm sorry. It sounded as though you said you wouldn't _let _me do this. But that isn't what partners do for each other, is it? They cooperate and guard each other's backs. They don't flat-out forbid someone else to do something."

"They do when their partner—and their lover—is a reckless idiot with no regard for his life," Draco said. His voice and his face were quiet and flat, his arms still folded as though he had found nothing worth moving for yet.

"You still can't _prevent _me from doing it," Harry felt the need to explain. But he did it kindly, because Draco seemed to feel a disconnect at bottom from the words Harry had offered so far. He would have to be patient with him, gentle. "You can make reasoned arguments, and I might listen to them and I might not. But you can't forbid me."

"Yes, I can." Draco lifted his head and turned it a little so that Harry could catch a better glimpse of his eyes, and Harry flinched from their coldness in spite of himself. Draco bared his teeth, looking pleased with his reaction. "I will."

"I'm starting to see why they have regulations that keep Auror partners from being lovers," Harry snapped, leaning forwards. "When they get all judgmental and possessive, it interferes with _moral _considerations."

"We're not supposed to make decisions like that," Draco said, his voice a soft gust of breath. "We don't have to. The Ministry hierarchy wrestles with hard questions like good and evil and how much they should pay us. We're supposed to do what they tell us."

Harry snorted in spite of himself. "Yes, of course, because Draco Malfoy has always been so obedient to the rules."

"I'm obedient to these," Draco said, straightening as though Harry had jammed a pin into his arse. "Because I don't want to _get sacked._"

"What was it you were telling me a few hours ago, how you didn't worry about your career?" Harry murmured.

Draco flinched himself to his feet, or that was what it looked like. He stared steadily at Harry, head half-lowered. Harry stared back at him, and kept his hands from clenching on his wand by sheer force of will. With the way Draco looked, he might need it in a short time.

"You are not allowed to worry about that," Draco said. "I said that. And I won't get sacked because of you."

"You can't know that," Harry began.

"I _won't_," Draco said, his voice lowering still further. "Because I won't allow you to sabotage me that way. I'll quit being partners with you first."

"Why is what I've done so far not enough to make you say that, but proposing a compromise that would save you some of the labor is?" Harry stared at him in true bafflement, shaking his head.

Draco shut his eyes and counted to thirty, audibly. Then he said, without looking at Harry, "What you've done so far has happened in the course of cases, of you trying to do your job, no matter how flawed some of your reasoning is when it comes to thinking about the job. But if you are proposing that we should stop doing what the Ministry pays us for—"

"We should do the moral thing," Harry said. "The moral thing is what I want." His heartbeat was fast in his ears, and his lips were dry. He had never once considered that his principles might cost him Draco. Why should he? His Hogwarts days, and thus his days of thinking that the world was black and white, were long behind him.

But it seemed that Draco might press the point after all, over something that Harry considered perfectly innocuous—that they shouldn't murder people. Of _course _they shouldn't, especially those people, like Alexander, who might have become twisted through no fault of their own. Why was it proving so hard for Draco to grasp that? Harry wanted to sit him down in a corner and make him talk until the truth came out, except that he suspected he wouldn't really understand what he might say in that connection, either.

"And what about the victims of the twisted that you're trying to coddle?" Draco stared off into the corner that Harry had been thinking about sitting him down in, and spoke in a faraway voice. "Do you really want to explain to a woman who lost her child or a brother who lost his sister that we could have killed that monster, but your conscience got in the way, and now the person they love is dead?"

Harry felt his heart knotting up. It blocked his throat. It was long moments before he could breathe properly again, longer before he could speak. "Don't _talk _about things like that," he whispered. "Of course I wouldn't let that happen. If a twisted was really violent, then I would make sure that we captured them."

"And if you didn't know that they were violent?" Draco went on studying him as though, once Harry had made him doubt his goodness, he would always have reason to doubt it again. "If they were like Alexander seemed at first, a little odd but harmless, or their gift was unknown, the way that the twisted on this case is?"

"We have no idea if there is a twisted in this case or not," Harry began, happy for an argument that might undo the knot in his throat.

"And if there is," Draco said, his voice so emotionless that it hurt Harry to listen to, "then you might lead someone to death after all, because you'll be wanting to protect it and help it." He leaned forwards until it seemed likely he would fall over. "And did you forget that the mandate of every Auror is to save the victims first? We can treat the criminals kindly _after _we ensure that they're not going to harm anyone. And we can't capture twisted at all unless we know that doing so won't endanger someone else's life."

"Back to the Ministry rules again," Harry muttered, and dragged his hand through his hair. It was crowded with sweat, as though he had been running. He didn't know why. "Don't you see that we have to change things, _we _have to make decisions, because _we're _the ones on the ground and the ones that the victims and the twisted both have to turn to? The ones who stay behind their desks all the time, the ones like Okazes, have no idea what we're dealing with."

For some time, Draco sat still again, and Harry assumed he would stand up in a minute and walk out of the room, ignoring Harry entirely. Then he snapped his teeth on air and said, "I'm going to do what I'm told because those are the rules that keep us safe, and then the victims, and then the twisted. _In that order, Potter._"

He shoved his chair back from his desk and turned to gather up some of the files in front of him. Harry started and threw out a hand. "Don't go," he tried to say, only the words knotted around each other in his throat and hurt him again.

Draco stared at him. Then he said, "If you want another partner, Harry, ask for one. As long as you're with me, then you're going to save my life and your own first, and then that of people like Jourdemayne. The twisted on rare occasions."

And he removed the locking spells and Silencing Charms on the door and walked out, leaving Harry to bury his head in his hands.


	4. Apologies in Time

Thank you again for all the reviews!

_Chapter Four—Apologies In Time_

"You look as though that went well."

Harry lifted his head quickly. He'd been sitting at his desk in the Socrates office, head in hands—more than a little futilely hoping that Draco would come back—but he'd had about enough of that for the moment, and this was Macgeorge. One didn't show weakness in front of her if one was fond of a quiet, taunt-free existence.

_And when did you ever have that? The Slytherins at school, Snape, Ron and his jokes, the twins and their pranks, and now Malfoy, of all people, as your partner._

Still, Harry managed a weak smile and picked up some of the parchments in front of him, rustling them around to look busy as Macgeorge crossed over to her desk. She was studying him all the while, cool dark eyes fastened on his face. "What went well? It's true that my work overwhelms me sometimes, but I think we're all that way."

Macgeorge gave a quiet snort as she let her hand glance off the paperweight on her desk that appeared to hold a set of mummified fingers. Harry was all but sure that she was a potential twisted, as well, and that her flaw was necromancy. "The argument that you and Malfoy were obviously having in here. No one locks the door to an office this public for any other reason."

Harry snorted in turn and decided that aggression might do to scare her off the scent. Malfoy—no, Draco, as far as he knew Harry might still have the right to call him that—hadn't tried that, because he thought being direct wasn't like a pure-blood or something. Harry didn't have the same sort of prejudices. "What does it matter to you? Our cases aren't yours."

Macgeorge took a step towards him, and some time in between a few moments ago and now, her humor had left her. "You're wrong," she said. "Your reputation is the reputation of our office and our Corps, or so the press treats it, given that you're the most famous member. Fuck up and it fucks everything up for all of us, Potter. That's why I care."

Harry let his cheeks fill with air, and bit the inside of the left one as it drained out again. "Fine. So you have some reason for caring. That doesn't mean that arguments between me and Draco are going to affect the way the Corps operates, you know. Draco is _far _too professional to let something like that happen." He heard the bitterness in his voice and would have given it a lot to call it back, but Macgeorge had already heard it, too.

"Too professional to fuck you," Macgeorge murmured. "Too ambitious to let his career commit suicide the way you are with yours."

Harry glared at her and cast a nonverbal curse that required almost no wand movement. The green light that zipped past Macgeorge's ear and buried itself in the wall next to her made her smile falter, at least. Harry sat back and said nothing when she glared at him.

"That's the trouble with you," she said at last, voice so slow with contempt that she sounded as if it physically hurt her. "You don't care about anything except your own little affairs, and then you use violence as a tool to try and settle the quarrels that arise. You're _surprised _that someone else would be concerned about your effect on the Corps, given that?"

"I only want you to stop questioning," Harry hissed at her, and let his hand, holding the wand, rise openly into the air this time. "You can ask all the questions you want of your partner, including why the Ministry keeps me on. But you don't have the right to ask them of me."

Macgeorge held still, her eyes glittering like jewels. "I'm sure a lot of people would ask why Malfoy deserves you," she said at last. "Hero of the war that you are. But from where I stand, it's more sensible to ask why _you _deserve _him_."

"I know that," Harry said, and stood up. He had planned to brood here in the office, but it was rather useless, with Macgeorge here and antagonizing him. "And I'm going to find him and apologize. Just wait."

She leaned back on her desk and watched him leave. Harry caught a glimpse from the corner of his eye of her finally turning away, shaking her head. Well, that was fine. She could do that if she liked. She just shouldn't touch Harry's desk, or Draco's. Draco might kill her if she did.

_I'd kill her._

Harry took a deep breath, stopped, and leaned his forehead against the wall, closing his eyes. His brain was scattered, his thoughts darting in all directions. This had never happened when he argued with Lionel. Then he could either laugh it off, the way he did with Ron, or he pondered on it, and only it, and nothing else, until he could come in in the morning to apologize. He forced himself to stand there, feeling the cool stone against his forehead and ignoring everything else, including the stares of passersby, until he felt in control of himself once more.

Then he realized he had no idea where Draco might have gone. With a wandering step and the vague notion that he might encounter him elsewhere in the Department of Magical Law Enforcement, Harry set out.

* * *

"Auror Malfoy!"

Draco raised his eyebrows and turned in a slow circle at the call from behind him. He had just delivered his report to Okazes. He dared even that wanker to find something wrong with it that fast, and to send a public reprimand.

But no, it was a woman who looked familiar, with dark eyes and a pointed nose, though Draco couldn't place her. She halted in front of him, bowed her head a little as though conveying a confidential appointment, and murmured, "Auror Malfoy, you have someone on my private Floo who would be glad to speak to you."

The droning, nasal voice enabled Draco to think of her name at last. He found his lips curving up in contempt, and tried to force them flat and smooth again. Aurelia Stonewall had once been a valuable political contact of his father's, although those days were somewhat past. "Thank you, Madam Stonewall, but I can't imagine who would _want _to call for me, and on your private Floo." Merlin knew that he had few other friends in the Department since Kellen's death, and without Harry, he might have none.

_No. I've not lost him. I'll persuade him to see my point-of-view somehow. He values my life, I know, and he's killed twisted himself. It's not as though he'd want me to die in order to save one of them._

"Pardon me, Auror Malfoy, but," Stonewall said, and her eyes flickered around as if to take in the population of the corridor before she spoke again. That only made Draco more wary. Some of the things that Stonewall had done for his father between the wars were shady enough to make Draco want to step away if she brought them up. "These are people who share the same blood as you."

For a moment, Draco thought he felt a star burning in his chest. Then the star froze and burst, scattering the particles of ice throughout his veins.

His parents had told him they would cut him off without remorse if he persisted in being an Auror. They had made no attempt to communicate with him in the seven years since. How likely was it that this would happen right now, after an argument with his partner? No, this had to be a trick. Someone, either one of his enemies or one of Harry's, had probably heard their fight and imagined that they could attack when the pair of them were vulnerable.

Time to show them that a Malfoy was never, _ever _vulnerable.

He smiled at Stonewall, and whatever was in the smile made her back off a step, staring at him all the while. "Tell them," Draco murmured, barely moving his lips, "these impostors or whoever they are, that I will be pleased to speak to them when the blood in my veins spills out of those veins."

"You don't understand, Auror Malfoy." Stonewall was standing out of reach, but she clasped her hands in front of her and gave him an imploring look that was either real or finer acting than Draco had thought a toady like her capable of. "These _are _the real—man and woman." Her head jerked around again, apparently checking on her audience once more. "I promise. Not a trick."

Draco rapped his fingers on his arm for a moment, and considered her. Stonewall bit her lip and ducked her head in a manner that someone, once, must have told her looked appealing.

Draco decided that he would go along. If it was the trick he suspected, then he was sure he could pick up on the identity of the prankster by seeing the setup. He was cleverer than they suspected, those enemies of his.

"Very well," he said. "I'll accompany you." He settled into stride beside Stonewall, who looked as though she wanted to bounce along the corridor. But she calmed her steps at the last moment, and managed to walk beside Draco the way a normal Ministry official would walk.

Eyes pressed on them anyway. Heads turned to track their movements, and once or twice a hand reached out as if to point at them, only to be snatched back by some other hand.

Draco walked without appearing to notice, his pride and resentment a congealed mess in his stomach. But Malfoys were masters, as well, of eating poor meals and pretending that they were the finest feasts.

And if pride made a poor meal, he could make of it a good seasoning.

* * *

"Are you Harry Potter?"

Harry glanced up with a forced smile. He had wandered the corridors of the Department for what felt like forever in search of Draco, and hadn't managed to find him. It was an effort not to snap at the young woman who stood in front of him, tangled dark hair spilling over her shoulders and dark eyes wide with apprehension, but he held himself back. After all, it was hardly her fault that Draco had apparently vanished from the Ministry.

And when Harry settled back and made himself reconsider her, she looked like someone who could use an Auror. Her nails were broken with scratching at something unyielding—perhaps even a stone wall, as it looked like. Her face had red marks that might have come from blows. She swayed on her feet, and her robes were torn away around her legs. Harry was amazed that she had come as far as she had without someone trying to help her.

"I'm him," he said, and pushed his fringe away from his scar as additional confirmation. The woman looked at it and smiled wanly, then closed her eyes and took a deep breath that seemed to exhaust her. The swaying became worse.

Harry steered her into an empty interrogation room and seated her gently next to the table. The woman put her arms on the table and buried her head in them. Her shoulders heaved up and down as if she was crying. Harry winced a little and sat back, trying to give her space and comfort and study her at the same time.

She looked younger than he was. In her early twenties, perhaps. And she had bony wrists that made him wince, and think of the summer, and a door with locks. Someone had held her captive for a long time, Harry thought.

"I need your help," she whispered, without raising her head, so that Harry could only make the words out by concentrating. "No one else believes me._ He _had me, the one with the blue eyes, but no one else thinks he exists. I heard him mention your name, though. You might." She looked up at last, and the wan smile returned. "At least you're listening to me without demanding to know what I'm talking about."

"What's your name?" Harry asked softly, trying not to show the way his heart wanted to jump out of his chest. If this was a lead on the blue-eyed twisted, a lead at last…

"Nancy." The woman leaned urgently forwards. "You believe me? You'll listen to me?"

"Yes," Harry said, and Summoned ink and parchment. Even if the door of the Socrates office was closed right now, those things were small enough to slip underneath it. He waited until they swooped in and settled before him, beginning to jot notes, included Nancy's name and appearance. "Now. How long were you his captive?"

Nancy licked her lips, and Harry noticed the cracks in them for the first time. It looked as though she had gone a long time without water. "It's hard to tell," she whispered. "But at least several days, because I remember being hungry, so _hungry_, and it was a long time before he fed me. He did give me enough to drink that I stayed alive, but not much more than that."

Harry nodded, his quill flying. "And could you tell me anything about where his house was?" He had hesitated over the word, but really, there was no reason to think that the blue-eyed twisted didn't live in a house like anyone else. And "lair" would probably sound too melodramatic.

_Though, _Harry thought as he looked back at Nancy, _she could use the laugh._

"It's hard to tell," Nancy repeated. "I know that I saw something red outside the window when I first got Apparated there, something huge and red. I think it was a maple tree in leaf? Maybe? But no, there was red beyond that," she added suddenly, fretful and curling her fingers into her palm as though she blamed the skin for being there. "Some kind of great dusty plain. A desert. That's what it was, a desert."

Harry wrote that down, although more slowly. He couldn't help reflecting that it would be just like the blue-eyed twisted to have cast a glamour over the surroundings outside his house, so as to fool someone who did hear about it and tried to look for it. On the other hand, it was also possible that it was just in a desert in another country, or that he had created some sort of magical defense that would make ordinary ground look red.

"And what was the house itself like?" he asked, with a pleasant sense of victory tingling up and down his spine. This would be the kind of information that might serve them best, when they were getting ready to attack. If they knew the setup and the defenses, they wouldn't have to spend as much time scouting.

_He could have used glamours inside, too, _he did remind himself dutifully. _No use counting your options before you have them._

"There was a big room on the ground floor where he took me at first," Nancy was whispering, eyes closed. "It was all white, and there were mirrors everywhere. He told me that he would keep me as long as he had a use for me, and the whole time he was speaking, I could see his face reflected from every direction, with those _awful _blue eyes. It was horrible."

Harry nodded and wrote that down too. "What about the dungeons where he kept you? I reckon they were dungeons?" he added a moment later, because that probably also sounded silly if it was a perfectly normal house. "Or was it an ordinary room?"

"It was a cellar." Nancy shivered, and Harry cast a Warning Charm on her and then Summoned the nearest cup of unattended tea. Nancy smiled her thanks without opening her eyes. "He left a light there, sometimes, or there was enough light coming in from under the door that led to the upstairs that I could see. But it wasn't—it wasn't _right_. I could see shadows moving with no light to cast them, and more than once I felt something touch me. But whenever I started to my feet, it was gone."

"Hmm," Harry said. He wrote the words, but with a note by them to remind himself that they might be influenced by something as small as the feet of rats scuttling over her, or more glamorus. "And do you know why he captured you?"

Nancy spent a few moments shuddering, her head bent. Harry waited on her. The cup of tea had arrived, but she hadn't touched it. He pushed it towards her, and she murmured thanks and reached out with one hand that was trembling and groped as if she would touch the cup, although she didn't actually land near it.

"Nancy?" Harry added, when enough time had passed that he didn't think she was going to remember to answer.

She lifted her head and stared at him with those haunted dark eyes.

"He said I was sick," she whispered. "Deathly sick, with something he knew the cure for, but he wasn't going to _give _me the cure. He said I was dangerous."

There was a small crumpling noise, like someone wadding up a sheet of parchment, and a faint starburst behind Harry's eyes. He frowned and reached up, wondering for a moment if this was what the victims of the blue-eyed twisted felt when he possessed them, but before the pain could develop into a full-blown headache, it faded. Harry looked up and around the room, then stared.

What the fuck was he doing in an interrogation room when he had gone in search of Draco? And why was the parchment in front of him covered with notes? About someone named Nancy, he noticed as he read, and the blue-eyed twisted. There was even a cup of tea beside him, as if he had sat there scribbling away at nonsense for a long time, although he couldn't remember why he would have. The argument with Draco was the important thing, and they had no new lead on the blue-eyed twisted. They hadn't even seen something that might have been evidence of his activity since the death of Leah Anderson, another twisted, after the Alexander case, when the blue-eyed one had evidently possessed her Auror guard and forced him to strangle her.

That at least made sense, Harry thought as he reached out to crumple the parchment in front of him, because Anderson had had—or said she did—the gift of locating any twisted. Likewise, it made sense that he might want to possess Harry, who hunted them and might hunt him someday, or Draco. But possessing Harry to force him to write down a description of an imaginary house, and someone named Nancy, when so far as he knew Harry had never met anyone with that name? It didn't make sense. No, Harry had probably been daydreaming, or suffered under the influence of a curse that someone had hit him with earlier in the day. He'd been struck like that several times before when he sparred.

His fingers started to crinkle the parchment.

And then stopped, and opened it again.

Drawn up at the top of the paper—no, not drawn, _seared_, as though someone had burned it into the paper—was the emblem of a star with the sun rising behind it.

* * *

Draco stepped into Stonewall's office, and there—

There they were, his mother's and father's faces floating in the fire.

Draco stopped near the door and composed himself, drawing around his shoulders the mantle of cool authority that he used when questioning recalcitrant witnesses. His posture was straight, his hands clasped lightly in front of him, and no one would be able to prove by the look on his face what he had felt when he saw them, his blood and bone, flesh of his flesh.

"Lucius," he said. "Narcissa." Their last letter had also said that he had lost the privilege of calling them "Mother" and "Father." Draco was distantly curious to see how well they would respond to his dropping of everything but their names.

For a moment, he thought they exchanged a glance, although they didn't turn towards each other. Well, he had had that sensation many times in childhood, as well. Invisible conversations, swirling around him, as he walked through the room where they sat or ran in the gardens with him watching them or recited his lessons in magic and mathematics and wizarding history under his father's critical eye and his mother's guidance. He had never managed to actually catch them exchanging those glances, or speaking those words, or thinking those thoughts.

And now was not the best time to begin trying. Draco half-bowed instead, and said quietly, "To what do I owe the pleasure?"

"It is no pleasure for us to speak to you, after not seeing you for so long," his mother said.

Draco savored the chime of her voice despite the sense of her words. He had never fully recovered from losing something that had been, once, so familiar. It was like being asked to tug his heart out of his body.

"Then it must be duty that brought you here," he said. "What duty?"

His father sniffed, the most delicate of sounds, certainly not one that anyone could ever call ill-bred. "You have grown ridiculously direct and indelicate since the events of seven years ago, Draco."

"I am what those seven years made me," Draco said, and saw a faint ripple run up his father's face from mouth to forehead. Good. Causing reactions in Lucius had always been the hardest task for Draco to accomplish when faced with his parents. "Working with direct and indelicate people will do wonders for one's constitution and tolerance of nonsense, true, but it does not do very much for one's appreciation of the finer things in life." He paused as if to think for a moment, and then snapped his fingers. "Of course, how silly of me. You deprived me of the finer things in life when you took my account away."

"You know we had to," Lucius said.

"There was no choice," Narcissa added. "How could we have _our son_ become one of the Aurors who had mistreated us?"

Draco stared at them and shook his head.

"What are you shaking your head for?" his mother murmured, leaning forwards for a moment as if truly interested in his reaction. Time had only made her a better actress.

"Becoming an Auror was practical for all sorts of reasons, including showing the doubters that our blood had been integrated back into the wizarding world," Draco said quietly. "Your notion of—of _retreat _was not. Becoming recluses? Refusing to speak to anyone without pure blood, including Ministry officials? This is a Muggleborn's world now, Mother. You know that. You simply don't want to acknowledge it."

"We will make and hold our own enclaves," his father began, and Draco saw a subdued, swift motion that might have been Narcissa touching him. Lucius paused a moment, nostrils flaring shut like a camel's, and then said, "At any rate. We contacted you for a reason. We will reinstate you as our heir, and not require you to give up the Auror position."

Draco stared at his father. "Your efforts to secure an alternative heir failed?" he asked faintly, but he was reeling. To be allowed in the Manor again, to have his money back, to enjoy the company of his parents insofar as he had ever enjoyed it, to be able to associate with the members of his _proper _social circle again instead of having a nodding acquaintance with pure-bloods in the Aurors—

"One may be direct without being indelicate," Narcissa said, which was as good as an admission.

"And in return," Lucius said, his voice so soft and lulling that it prolonged Draco's daydream for a moment, "you have only to give up Harry Potter."


	5. Oddness in the Auror Department

Thank you again for all the reviews!

_Chapter Five-Oddness in the Auror Department_

Draco stood quite still for a long moment. It was the best way to calm the roaring in his ears, to make it freeze and turn into an ocean of ice that he could cross, instead of a sea that would drown him.

Then he smiled and shook his head. "I must have misheard you," he said. "It sounded as though you said that I'd have to give up Harry in order to become your heir again." He had used Harry's first name deliberately, and was rewarded when he saw his father's slight flinch, too quick to escape concealment. His lip curled the more.

"Yes, you do," his mother said, with a motion down by her side that was probably her hand resting, once again, in the middle of his father's back or on his arm. "Surely you must see that the man who killed his father's Lord is not a proper friend for the heir of the Malfoys."

Draco stared at her for another reason. Then he said, "You might just as well say that the woman who lied to that Lord to save his destroyer is not a proper mother for the heir, either."

Narcissa flushed, a wave of delicate pink that washed all the way down to her neck where it emerged from her pale robes. Then she shook her head, hard, as if by doing that she could make things other than what they were. At last she said, "I had my reasons. They were focused on you and preserving our family, Draco. If you asked Potter, he would be the first one to tell you that."

"I think he understood that, yes," Draco said, although he and Harry had never discussed the matter in any detail. "But he saved my life as well. The Malfoy family has always paid its debts, you told me. Or does that not include life-debts?"

His father flushed this time, along the jaw. He cleared his throat with a note that Draco thought-or hoped-would have rung false even without the previous words as a warning, and said, "I am sure that you have saved his life enough times in the course of your _investigations _to repay any lingering remnant of the debt, Draco."

"And he has saved mine, again." Draco let his smile sharpen, until it was the one that he usually offered those criminals who had tried to kill Harry. "So we are tangled together, in a knot without beginning or end."

Lucius shut his eyes in something that might have been disgust or weariness; Draco had never learned to tell those emotions apart on his face. His mother leaned forwards, as if she imagined Draco would focus so completely on her that he wouldn't notice his father's expressions, and said, "Draco, if you would _pay attention_, you would see that we are offering you everything you professed to want when we first cut you off seven years ago."

"And you do not think seven years changes a person?" Draco asked, and then paused and nodded. "Ah, yes. I can see why you would think otherwise, congealed as you are."

Perfect stillness passed over both his parents at the same time, so that once again it was like a Floo call from a pair of statues. Draco watched them, panting slightly, and all he could think of, as he contrasted them with Harry and even the other Socrates Aurors in his mind, was, _How lifeless._

"You offer me everything I wanted, except my Auror career and my Auror partner," Draco said at last, when he realized that they would never speak and so it was up to him to do so. "You offer me, therefore, without change, the same choice that you did seven years ago. I made my decision then. I would make the same one now." He stood up and turned away from the Floo, his mouth powdery with disappointment. He would have expected better from his parents as they got some emotional and temporal distance from the war.

Then again, perhaps he should not have been surprised. They had been incapable of understanding, even then, that he was not a child anymore and so not under their rule. Perhaps _that _was what would never truly change, war or not.

"Draco."

His mother did not call on him to wait, but she might as well have, using that tone. Draco turned his head and listened courteously, without blinking and without facing her fully again. She would have to earn that.

"Yes, Draco," Narcissa said, her voice soft and regal, "we do request that you give up your partner. But everything else, you may have. The career, even. We-understand that you had to do something to redeem the Malfoy name after the war, and this is as good a way as any. We were unable to accept that at the time because of the way the Aurors had treated us."

_More politely than they treated any other Death Eaters, _Draco thought, staring at the wall. _And the reason for that? Harry, again, who told everyone he could find that you lied for him and I saved his life. Once. Which one could consider repaid by the way that he snatched me from the Fiendfyre. But Harry doesn't think like that. _

When had _he_, for that matter, started thinking more like Harry than like his parents?

He turned and leaned against the wall, letting his Auror cloak drape and flow around him, emphasizing his slenderness, his muscles, his strength. A subtle change came over his parents' faces. Draco nodded. They knew the importance of presentation, and he wanted them to think about the difference he might make to the Malfoy name dressed like this: the noble Auror, the Malfoy who had risen from the pyre where his father had burned their pride and made it into a phoenix of service to the Ministry.

Of course, saying it in such open terms was something Harry would do, and therefore something his parents would despise. He had to remain in the shelter of his deception for the moment, and let his gestures and appearance wear away at his parents' resolve.

"What is so objectionable about Harry?" he asked. "I am paired with one of the most powerful Aurors in the Ministry, one of the most powerful wizards in the world. Surely that's good enough, even for a Malfoy."

His parents shifted and glanced at each other, and then Narcissa said, "You know that from the Socrates Corps, you will never rise."

"It is the cellar," his father said. "Used for Aurors who are good for nothing else, either because they cause trouble or the Ministry hierarchy distrusts them." His open stare said that he had no doubt into which category Draco fell.

"I have sometimes thought something like that," Draco said, stating the bald truth and letting them take it for a gracious concession. They swallowed the bait, as he saw by his mother's slow smile, and he wanted to shake his head in wonder. How was it that Harry-tactics-he might as well call them that-were serving him better here than all the political sophistication he had learned at his father's knee?

"Then you must know," Narcissa said, "that you need another Corps to advance. And that means another partner. The Ministry will never let Potter out of his service there, Draco. It is the perfect place for him. Arrests that don't exist, wizards whose crimes cannot be admitted, murder that will stain his name if it should ever come before the public again. Whereas _you_..." She let her voice caress the word.

"If the Head Auror distrusts me that much," Draco said, "then separating from Harry wouldn't mater. I can't change my name, or my heritage."

That won him his first fully approving smile from his father in seven years. No, longer, Draco thought, his breath catching as his heart danced against his ribs. Ten, at least. Since the war. He held his father's eyes and tried, hard, not to let the expression seduce him.

"Then you understand the ramifications of the situation better than I had feared you did," his father murmured. "Draco. You _must _see that Potter's partnership is not the gift you may have thought it was when you first become paired with such a powerful and well-known man. Potter has squandered his fame, and all the power he could have used for advancement. He would rather pursue quixotic quests for causes of dubious worth than make himself into Head Auror, which he could have done by now if he had _used _the strength that would have gathered itself behind him. I see by your eyes that you yourself had seen and despised this trait in him," he added quietly.

Draco had curled his lip when he thought about Harry's insistence that they shouldn't kill the dangerous twisted, sure enough, but he was not about to give up an inch of ground to his father. "I may have seen it," he said. "I may even have despised it. Have you thought about what it would mean if I left my partner not because we had an argument, but simply because I cared about my own standing? No one else would be eager to partner with me-"

He stopped, because his father was laughing. It wasn't easy for anyone to see who didn't know him, but there it was, the ripple of laughter in his mouth and the sparks that had appeared in his eyes.

"Draco, one of Potter's previous partners left him because she could not stand him," whispered Narcissa. "It is hardly without precedent. Go to Okazes and tell him that you are tired of Potter's attention-seeking, his attempts to shed his life as if it were an irritating burden, his failure to guard you. I assure you, Okazes will be sympathetic."

Which was code for the fact that Okazes must have taken money from his father in the past. Well, perhaps that explained his attempts to ride herd on Draco over the years since. He might dislike Draco not for having his name, but for having, as his parents would see it, betrayed that name.

"Who was that partner?" Draco asked, because he didn't think he had heard that particular tale. Of course, he had entered Auror training as Potter was being promoted to full fieldwork, and had been too involved in what was happening around him, and then struggling to survive both his cases and the contempt of the Department after that, to really notice such scandals unless they hit him directly.

"Lauren Hale," Narcissa said. "Find her. It may be that she will have some amusing tales to tell you."

"And when you have talked to her," Lucius added, sounding as if he was conscious of using someone else's fireplace to conduct a conversation as delicate as this one, "then find us again."

The fire blinked out. Draco shut his eyes and shook his head slowly, wondering why he should have expected a farewell from people who had cut off contact with him for seven years, and still hadn't showed the slightest sign of regret for having done so.

He turned away, half-making up his mind to find Hale immediately, and nearly ran into Stonewall. She stood there with her hands clasped and her head bowed as if she was praying. _By the shrine of power and influence, doubtless, _Draco thought dryly.

"I hope that I have been helpful to you and your family, Auror Malfoy?" Stonewall whispered. "I hope that I have earned some-future consideration, if not present?"

Which was as naked a plea for Galleons as Draco had ever heard. He looked at her, and when she finally lifted her head and met his eyes, she recoiled from him, banging hard into a cupboard behind her. She looked at the floor, swallowed, licked her lips, and added hastily, "Of course, your parents have been more than generous, and reassured me that I had helped them."

"Good," Draco said. "_Do _remember that." And he turned and strode out of the office, wondering only when the door had closed behind him if he should have asked her how to find Hale.

_No, _he decided. He was sure that she had not listened to their conversation-one of his parents would have spotted her if that was the case, or Draco, with his Auror training-but mentioning the name of Harry's former partner would reveal too much of the conversation's content.

Draco's blood buzzed, and he headed back to the Socrates office in a far different frame of mind than he had left it. He had a chance at his heritage back. His money, his circles, his friends. His life.

The trick would be persuading his parents to give him their backing, to accept him as their heir, while also retaining Harry. Because Draco had no intention of giving anything he wanted up, ever again.

Only when he stepped into the office did he see Harry sitting at his desk, head in his hands as he studied a piece of parchment, and remember the row that had driven him out of it. Draco felt his lips thin as he clutched at the door with a hand that had gone still. He would lash out if Harry said the wrong thing, and perhaps, in a more fey frame of mind, he would go to his parents and accept their offer as it stood.

Harry looked up and saw him. His face was ashen enough that Draco had crossed half the distance between them before he thought about what he was doing, and then it would have been silly to pretend he had not and go back. He completed the journey, and opened his mouth.

Then he saw the symbol of the morning star burned into the parchment that Harry sat looking at, and changed his focus.

"What does _this _mean?" he asked quietly, tracing it with one finger.

"That's what I've been trying to determine for the last hour," Harry said, and gave Draco a ghastly smile. "I woke up to find myself in an interrogation room, with a bunch of nonsense about meeting a woman named Nancy who was a captive of the blue-eyed twisted written on this parchment in front of me. I was about to throw it away-I thought I had been dazed by one of the spells in that intense sparring session the other day-until I saw this." He flicked his finger at the star and sun at the top of the page.

Draco picked up the paper and read the "nonsense." "And you don't think the blue-eyed twisted possessed you?" he asked when he was done. "You have no memory of the time that you spent under the influence of this spell?"

"Why would he tell us a bunch of information about his house, even in jest?" Harry nodded at the notes on the paper. "I can see possessing me to make me kill someone, or kill myself, if he's really afraid that we might find him someday. But this? Is silly."

"To make you doubt your sanity?" Draco asked, but Harry was already shaking his head, and gave the answer Draco had thought of a moment later.

"We know he exists. I might doubt my sanity if we didn't, but whatever happened didn't erase all my memories of him, or make the notes on this parchment such complete nonsense that I threw it away. Whatever happened left this behind." He reached out and let his fingers linger on the shape of the morning star.

"Then it must have been the twisted we are hunting," Draco said quietly. "A bold one, to walk into the Ministry and leave his symbol behind. The morning star as a twisted symbol makes sense, you know. Not all of them have them, but Larkin did."

Harry grimaced and nodded. "Although that doesn't answer the question of where the notes come from, the ones that keep appearing around Jourdemayne's house. If the twisted is targeting her, why? Why not just kill her instead?" He waved the parchment around. "Why not kill me, for that matter? If they can make me forget-"

He stopped at the same time Draco did, and they met each other's eyes.

"That's it, I'm sure," Draco said quietly, his blood buzzing again. "This twisted has the power to make someone forget their appearance."

"But they can't erase _written _things." Harry touched the parchment. "Although that doesn't answer the question of why they didn't destroy them in a physical way-but, well, there's no saying this one is sane."

Abruptly, the corners of his mouth turned down, and he sighed and glanced up at Draco. "I'm sorry for some of what I said," he muttered. "I don't really expect you to sacrifice your life to save a twisted. That's not what we became Aurors to do. We're supposed to treat criminals respectfully, ethically, but not better than we do ourselves."

Draco viciously crushed the immediate response he wanted to make, and studied Harry again. Harry sat up in his chair and stared back. "What?" he snapped. "I'll explain more if you want me to, but I thought I was pretty clear."

Draco nodded, once. "But that doesn't mean that you think we shouldn't save _some _twisted. Your position is clear. But I fail to see what has changed, and what would make you apologize to me."

Briefly, he thought of mentioning his parents and what they had said about Hale, but he put the notion aside for the moment. Those were weapons that he might choose to pull out when it was time for them.

* * *

Harry sighed and ran a hand over his scar. He still had a residual headache from whatever spell or influence or hypnosis he had been under, and he really _didn't _know what Draco wanted him to say.

"I still think we should save the sane ones," he said. "Not immediately try to kill everyone the Ministry accuses of being twisted."

A faint smile played along Draco's lips, and he looked right into Harry's eyes. "It's not usually the Ministry accusing them," he said smoothly. "It is their own actions, or lack of them. It is their symbols, and their companions, and their flaws."

Harry looked towards Draco's left arm and the hidden Dark Mark, symbol and even source of his own flaw if Draco was right, and said nothing.

Draco clenched one hand down over the sleeve, and said, "You know that we don't hunt people that act sane and then turn out to be very often, Harry. Larkin was wrong from the beginning. It took us a while to learn about Alto, but I was-the victim in that case, the one falling under her charm. Alexander seemed harmless at first, but didn't turn out that way in the end. I don't know what you _want_. You act as if there's a whole class of harmless twisted out there being unfairly hunted down, but every one we've come across has tried to kill us, or manipulate us, or put us in a coma."

Harry bowed his head and tried to think about making his point reasonably this time, without letting either his positive or his negative feelings about Draco influence it. At last he murmured, "I just want us to be more mindful of it. It would be a good beginning if we tried to change the Ministry's definition of the twisted. That would make it clear that sometimes these cases need to be grey instead of black and white."

"And that will just make it all the more complicated," Draco said, voice strenuous but low, "when they try to kill someone, and new recruits to the Socrates Corps are hesitating between different procedures."

"I said we should change the definition, not the procedures," Harry snapped, leaning forwards. "Don't you ever _listen?"_

"Changing one means changing the other," Draco said, unmoved. "And it could put our lives in danger. It could put the lives of other Aurors in danger, not to mention those the twisted attack. Like Jourdemayne. You do remember her, I trust? The one tormented by your twisted who can erase memories, the one who may indeed be as innocent as a lamb but is causing Jourdemayne anxiety all the same?"

Harry ran his fingers through his hair in frustration. Draco was right, that was the problem. The Ministry _would _consider changing the definition the same as changing the procedures. Convince them that the twisted weren't so easily defined as they thought they were right now, and they would ensure that Harry and Draco had more to do when following them, more paperwork to fill out, more justification to do when they killed a twisted.

At the same time, though, Harry couldn't stand the hypocrisy of simply being Aurors who committed murder when they were supposed to _protect _people.

"All right, look," he said at least. "What if _we _try to understand the twisted? Go back and document everything we know about them. Start writing a report on the differences between Larkin, Alto, and Alexander, and maybe the new one when we know who he is. Or she," he added, looking back at the parchment in front of him that he'd scribbled with notes about Nancy. "If and when we end this case and we're both still in shape to do it, then we can complete the report and submit it to the Ministry. You know they take forever to get anything done, but-it's still something."

Draco stared at him, unblinking, for so long that Harry could only assume he'd committed some other mistake without knowing it. Then he smirked. "A sop to your conscience that won't interfere with our work," he said, "since, yes, the Ministry will take forever to make decisions based on it. I _like _it."

Harry stood up and paced around his desk to be nearer Draco. To his surprise, Draco didn't move away, just went on looking at him with steady, bright eyes.

"I didn't mean it that way," Harry said, softly and passionately, into his face. "I still want to do something more than this, something to acknowledge that not all twisted are the same and we might be able to help some of them."

"When you come up with a way to do that doesn't put our lives in danger," Draco said back at him, his voice as soft and vivid, "you tell me."

Harry turned away with a snarl and folded his arms. He hated disagreeing with Draco, much the same way he had hated doing it with Lionel, but at least their past gave him more practice with it.

"What now?" he muttered, aware that he sounded sulky, and not really caring.

He thought he heard Draco mutter something under his breath that included the name "Hale," and turned around swiftly. "What?" he demanded. Working with Lauren was a bad memory that he spent a lot of his time trying to keep from intruding into the front of his mind.

Draco sighed. "Something I should keep to myself for the time being. Come on, let's go talk to Jourdemayne again. She might have written something else down besides those notes-if _she _wrote them-which could reveal the existence of this twisted, or her power."

He held open the door of the office for Harry. Harry paused to glare into his eyes on the way out and say, "I might fight with you, but I do still like you a lot, you know. There isn't much I wouldn't do for you."

Draco looked strange for a second, but his hand was utterly strong as he rested it on Harry's shoulder and said, "I can't think of anything I wouldn't do for you."

_Except spare the twisted, _Harry thought, but on the whole, he departed from the office satisfied, and listened to Draco's footsteps ringing behind him with the same sense of satisfaction.


	6. Nancy in the Pages

Thank you again for all the reviews!

_Chapter Six—Nancy in the Pages_

When she opened her door to find them on her front step, Katherine Jourdemayne looked as if she might faint. She tightened her hands on the shawl that looped around her throat, a bright red as though she was hoping she could warm herself that way, and looked wildly from one to the other of them.

"You haven't caught them yet," she whispered. "You haven't caught them."

Draco opened his mouth to speak. Harry tilted his hand down at his side, and Draco luckily caught the gesture and swallowed whatever he had been about to say. Harry knew it would have been something scathing, something impatient.

He knew that Draco easily became irritated with what he saw as weakness. That was why Harry could sometimes interview suspects better. He moved forwards and lowered his voice to ask, "What have they done now?"

Jourdemayne caught her breath with a gasp and a sob, and reached out to him, drawing him close. Harry went, bowing his head so that her voice could reach his ears.

"They left me a threat. A _threat_. The writing is different on this one. I mean, it's not my writing. But I don't know how it got into my house, and I don't know what it means, and even if I _wanted _to I can't do what they want if I don't know what it means…" Her voice trailed off in an incoherent wail.

Harry knew that Draco was curling his lip without looking back. He didn't intend to let that bother him. He let his hand lean on Jourdemayne's shoulder instead and lowered his voice still further. "Can we see the note?"

Jourdemayne looked up at him like a rabbit, and spent a few moments standing there, trembling, as if she wanted someone to show up and make the decision for her. Harry held still, and held her gaze, and tried as hard as he could to look like the shining, trustworthy Boy-Who-Lived, one of the few times he had ever _wanted _to play that role. But if it would convince her now to tell the truth instead of shutting them out, then it was justified.

"All right," Jourdemayne whispered finally, bowing her head as if surrendering to the inevitable, and turned her back. "You can come in."

Harry resisted the temptation to glance back at Draco, and instead nodded and followed her. Sometimes Draco's methods, the icy way he spoke and the more indirect questioning, worked wonders, but not always.

* * *

Draco was no more impressed by Jourdemayne's home than he had been the first time they visited. He wondered idly if Harry realized what a torment it was to someone who had received a proper pure-blood raising, to see precious artifacts taken and _willfully _misused. Jourdemayne was aspiring to a heritage that she would never have, something that _could not _be absorbed the way she was trying to absorb it. And she was intelligent enough to know that, cringing coward that she was. There were times cowardice was only good sense, and against a twisted that could erase one's memory might be one of them.

But even if Harry had had that kind of pure-blood raising, Draco doubted he would have accepted the perspective Draco automatically took.

Harry crouched down by Jourdemayne when she tried to collapse into a chair, whispering into her ear the way he had by the door. She looked up at him, appeared to listen for a moment, and then nodded towards a small table, burying her head in her hands again and letting her long and tangled hair fall around her fingers.

The note was obvious, a small square of white as it was in the middle of a dark table. Harry Levitated it rather than picked it up and read it through. A small frown pinched between his brows before he gestured to Draco and stood back to let him read the note.

Draco bent close. The hand did indeed look different from the writing in the other notes that Jourdemayne had received; he'd stared at those long enough in the file, and when casting spells on them, to know. It was awkward, curved and looping and sprawling. If pressed, Draco would have said it that it came from someone who had injured their hands recently.

_Shelter me. Take me in. Say nothing of this. The morning star._

But no name, and no directions other than that, and Draco could see why it would be frightening if Jourdemayne had no memory of the writer. He stepped back and jerked his head a little at Harry, indicating he could have this one.

Harry knelt at Jourdemayne's feet and took one of her hands, gazing up into her face like a worshipper. Draco restrained his snarl with an effort. He decided that he could do worse than leave the room while Harry interrogated their witness, so that his scowl wouldn't interrupt the questioning, and stepped out.

Jourdemayne's house was bigger than he had originally thought it was, with multiple corridors leading in all directions and shining rooms with light coming through many and varied windows, but none of it was in any better taste. Draco walked past a rank of portraits he would have given much to restore to their rightful families and halted to peer into another room.

It was a potions lab, or so he thought from some of the cauldrons and vials still on the shelves. But what struck him was how _scrubbed _it was. The tables gleamed. The floors looked as though someone had swept not only Cleaning Charms but Deep-Cleaning Charms over them.

In fact…

Draco moved a step back and raised his eyebrows. Yes. Viewed from the door, it was obvious that someone had indeed swept something off a large swathe of the shelves and tables and benches and desks. It began about three degrees to the right of the door itself and carried on, in a general arc shape, until close to the far wall, at which time the normal clutter of an active brewer (dirty vials, caked cauldrons, splatters of unknown origin) abruptly appeared again.

Draco gave a thin smile and moved further into the room. He reckoned that he should have noticed this the first time they had investigated Jourdemayne's house, but then again, they had been mostly occupied with the notes that first time. And he doubted he could have seen the removal of clutter so clearly from anything but that one particular angle.

He moved among what was left, using a thin layer of air when necessary to insulate his skin from what was around him so that he wouldn't disrupt any of the evidence Aurors might need to figure out what had happened here. Or, well, that he and Harry would need; at this point, it seemed foolish to assume that someone else would be brought onto the case unless he and Harry both died.

He crouched down, his knee hovering above what looked like a random smudge of dust on the floor, but which resolved into an image the longer he stared at it. The image of a star with waving rays about it, which one could see as the rising sun if one squinted and was a bit imaginative.

_And it doesn't take much imagination to be part of the Order of the Morning Star._

"What are you doing?"

Draco turned his head. A young woman stood in the center of the doorway of the lab, her hands pressed to her mouth and her eyes staring at him. She shook her head as she caught his gaze and muttered, "But he said it wouldn't happen. She _said _it wouldn't happen."

Draco didn't think he would have recognized her without reading Harry's "nonsense," but that was enough to tell him who she must be. He slipped his hand down to his wand while smiling blandly at her, the same smile that had convinced his Auror instructors he had left his "horrible past" behind when he started his training. "Miss Nancy, I presume?"

Her eyes flashed at him, and she gasped. She flung out one hand in front of her, and Draco dodged. If she used her flaw with gestures, then he would avoid being in the direct line of them, and that meant he should be able to—

She caught his eye, and there was a crumpling noise in his ears and a flash of pain in his head. Draco cursed softly and raised his hand to touch his brow, dropping his wand. Luckily, the spells he had cast meant that it rolled across the floor instead of landing directly on something, and spared the dusty picture of the morning star.

What had he been doing? It wasn't as though something had sprung out of nowhere to assault him. In fact, he had the impression that he had been involved in an important investigation and discovering _important _things until whoever or whatever it was had come along and interrupted him.

He stared around. The lab stared back at him. There was no way to recover the fleeting thoughts that he had let go, he thought, but—

Then his eyes fell on the image on the floor, and his stomach tightened at the same time as it dropped. The dust had fallen away from the picture, and no imagination or squinting was required to see it now. The symbol of the morning star practically shone, with a faint silvery sheen to its edges that Draco thought would have been on the parchment copy Harry possessed, too, except that it had been burned in instead.

Their latest twisted had been here.

* * *

"There is something else."

Harry managed to keep the triumphant grin from appearing on his face, but it was difficult. _This _was the sentence he had been waiting to hear for the almost twenty minutes that he'd been speaking to Jourdemayne. He kept his face calm and his voice low as he said, "Is there?"

Jourdemayne gave a shaky gulp and an even shakier smile and nodded. "Yes. I kept—diaries for most of the last year. Ritual diaries."

_You were right, Draco. She did have some contact with this Order at some point. _At least, Harry couldn't imagine that Jourdemayne would have a reason to keep ritual diaries without that. He inclined his head and said, without inflection, "May I see them?"

Jourdemayne considered him for a long time. Harry had the strong feeling that she would let him look at them, having told him of their existence in the first place, but he didn't want to hurry her into feeling that she _had _to offer. He kept still instead, looking at her the whole time, and finally Jourdemayne nodded, jerkily. "Yes. I—I have to blur out some names, first. Otherwise, you would learn secrets that aren't mine to tell. I looked at the diaries the other day, and not even I can know who everyone was. And they only used their false names when I was around, but even those are too sacred for an outsider like you."

Harry didn't smile. Jourdemayne, he thought, was someone who would only talk in full flow when she had her confidence, and had reason to feel that someone else respected her. Let her feel superior to him as an initiate of this Order or whatever the technical term was. As long as he solved the case, someone else's incidental superiority to him really didn't matter. "All right. Just don't blur anything you think might let us solve this persecution."

Jourdemayne drew herself up, tangled hair and all. "I have to protect the members of my Order. That's more important than anything else."

Seen like this, she had a kind of dignity, and proved that she could also have courage. Harry inclined his head. "Then do what you have to do. Just—make sure that you don't obscure anything that you don't _have _to."

Satisfied with that injunction, it seemed, Jourdemayne nodded at him and hurried out of the room. Harry sat up, stretched, and wondered where Draco had got to.

He had felt him leave, of course; they couldn't work as closely together as they had, and _be _as close together as they had, and not have Harry feel that. But it didn't tell him the answer. Harry rose to his feet and looked around the room, taking in the disorder and clutter as he had before, and then raised his eyebrows when Draco came around the corner at something very near a dead run.

Draco checked himself when he saw that the room was empty, and cocked his head at Harry. Harry smiled. "Jourdemayne thinks she has some other writings where mentions of this twisted might survive," he said. "Ritual diaries."

Draco nodded. "I think I saw her," he said. "I can't _remember _it, but the image of the morning star was faint on the floor of Jourdemayne's Potions lab, and then it came to life after a sensation in my head as if someone had crumpled my thoughts."

Harry smiled more widely. It was frustrating hunting an enemy you couldn't remember, but at least they had a description of her from the writing Harry had done, and they knew the telltale signs now. "Then she's a regular twisted, fitting the classic definition," he muttered. "The symbol—but you haven't seen any sign of companions, have you?"

Draco shook his head with a faint frown. "And no sign that she only uses Dark Arts and can't use Healing magic. But those have always been the hardest parts of the definition to determine, unless you actually see them in battle."

"And we can't see her in battle now that she's erased the memory for us," Harry finished, and snorted. "I thought she vanished, or that I might have hallucinated her. But now I know. She was probably still in the room with me, and just walked out. I would ignore her utterly as long as the memories were gone."

"That makes no sense," Draco murmured. "She came to you for help, or it sounds like she did. Why erase your memory and leave again? I can understand what was happening with Jourdemayne, perhaps an experiment gone wrong. But—why you?"

"She couldn't withstand the full force of my charming personality," Harry suggested, and had the privilege and pleasure of seeing Draco grin.

Jourdemayne, coming back into the room with a stack of slender books that were presumably the ritual diaries, eyed them warily. Harry gave her a smile and reached out a hand. "These are them? Thank you," he added, when Jourdemayne stood still and refused to let them go. "Or haven't you finished the spells that would blank out the names non-initiates aren't allowed to see?"

Draco started to open his mouth, but Harry flicked him a glance, and he shut up. Jourdemayne still looked back and forth between the two of them before she answered. "I—thought that you would be reading them by yourself," she said. "Not your partner."

"What's the matter?" Draco asked, his voice a soft, taunting, tilting balance. "Afraid that I might recognize names you would prefer I didn't?"

Harry jumped and then glared at Draco, wondering how in the world he had misjudged Jourdemayne so much. He was usually better than that with witnesses.

But maybe he had noticed that Jourdemayne had recovered her courage, and thought that meant he could ask questions like that, because instead of retreating with a wail or collapsing back into her hands-over-the-face posture, Jourdemayne scowled at Draco and replied, "Yes, I am. You have no idea how delicate those names are, and what kind of magic they conceal. You have the training to recognize that kind of thing. Your partner does not."

Harry had not the slightest idea what they were talking about, or how Draco could see through an obscuring charm of the kind that Jourdemayne had talked about casting. But he didn't snap. He folded his arms instead, and watched. Draco did indeed know the right way to handle a witness, even one Harry thought from time to time that he felt scorn for.

* * *

Draco felt his lips part. He could feel the words waiting on his tongue, tasting like finest brandy. And Jourdemayne, from the looks of it, was ready to protect what she felt as hers, hunching her shoulders and glaring like a lioness crouching over her cubs.

Harry kept silent. Draco didn't know whether that was wisdom or instinct or just confusion, and he didn't intend to glance over to check. This was a simple contest between him and Jourdemayne now, and he knew that Harry wouldn't interfere. That was enough.

"These are the delicate records of a delicate order," Jourdemayne said, and balanced the journals for a moment as though moving them would change the fate of a world. "Secrets never meant to bear the light of day."

"And yet," Draco said softly, almost too softly, as he saw Jourdemayne balance on her heels in turn and lean forwards to hear him, "they are meant to change and order lives, to teach you how to live. It isn't as though they were never meant to be learned by someone else."

"You aren't the right person to learn them." Jourdemayne's eyes were almost impossible to see the color of now, they were narrowed so far.

"Tell me why." Draco folded his arms and smiled at her. "As you yourself acknowledge, I surely have the right heritage."

"You aren't initiated."

Draco almost smiled again. Yes, this was something he understood. The right language for something like Jourdemayne's rigid order was grandiose, and he could do that.

"The war initiated me into pain and suffering," he said. "Attending Hogwarts initiated me into knowledge that my father wasn't always right, and that might have been the most painful thing of all. What is human destiny but a series of learning experiences, of engagements, of teaching anew? And within the past year, I have joined a new Corps in the Aurors, and acquired a new partner, and learned things about myself that I cannot share with you, revisions of my past and _changings _of my past." He leaned forwards. "Tell me again that I am not experienced enough to know about your Order."

Jourdemayne stood a moment, her arms still folded, cradling and hiding the books both at once. Then, all at once, she bowed her head and closed her eyes.

"You still do not understand," she whispered. "The names would tell you things that they should not. Not about the blood but the soul of the possessors."

Draco nearly snorted. So it was _that _kind of objection, was it? He should have known it. Jourdemayne's compatriots had chosen pretentious Latin titles, then, the sort that they believed revealed their "inner nature." And they believed that their own secrets and possessions were of as much interest to others as they were to them.

"I don't care about the people in your Order, unless we see the name of the twisted we're hunting," he said. "We believe she might linger in your records. That's all we want, and the reports we write don't have to include every detail of the investigation." He put out his hand, and waited.

Jourdemayne still considered him with narrowed eyes for a long moment. "You have no idea what you're asking, what we've learned."

Draco licked his lips, and held back the acid words that he knew exactly what they had "learned": nonsense incantations that didn't work but which they believed came to them from some other world which had a different kind of magic, patterns to meditate on that were indistinguishable from scribbles done by St. Mungo's patients under repeated memory charms, "secrets" that consisted of Latin words repeated over and over until they blended and changed in their memories. He only looked into her eyes and asked, "Do you want to go back to a life without these notes appearing everywhere, or not?"

Jourdemayne closed her eyes and moved her mouth in what might have been a prayer. Then she handed the books over.

Draco winced as he accepted them. They were heavier than he had expected for journals that small, a weight that made his wrists ache. He opened them wondering if they had pages of lead, or gold, an affectation that some of the richer secret Orders had practiced in the past.

Then his eyes fell on the first page, written in a mixture of twisting characters that he suspected were Jourdemayne's obscuring spells and ordinary English letters, and the bottom dropped out of his subject.

_Shit. _The weight came from the pages and the letters themselves, which were so thick with magic that they looked incised into the page.

Jourdemayne's Order was real. They _had _found something that Draco hadn't seen before, a dance on the edge of meaning that tantalized his mind even though he wasn't dazed with incense and chanting and all the other rituals that were meant to bedazzle the minds of initiates at these ceremonies.

He met Jourdemayne's eyes, and she looked back at him, so calm that Draco shuddered. He was seeing her as he thought she probably was in her Order, a priestess in the center of her mysteries. He asked, "What did you do?"

"Draco?" Harry's worried voice said, somewhere far away. He couldn't come into the center of the circle. For a while, for the moment, he was not important.

"We have not done it all yet," Jourdemayne said. "But yes. This is true magic. I know what you thought we were, and it is understandable. But we are not." She reached out and touched the cover of the open diary Draco was holding, and he felt it become inexplicably lighter in her hands.

Draco stared some more at her. Jourdemayne looked back, still as calm as a queen. In the end, he shook his head and began to flip through the pages, looking for some sign of the morning star.

He found the symbol near the bottom of a page, surrounded by letters that looked like hieroglyphs but that twisted, again, when he tried to look at them. He held stern until he thought they had settled and then began to read, letting his finger lightly trace the lines when he began to lose his place again.

Yes, there was the name Nancy, but no identifying last name, and no description. It was no wonder that Jourdemayne had forgotten this reference existed, in among all the names of the other people she had studied with.

And what they had been studying—

"You can't _do _that," Draco snapped, looking up. "All the Time-Turners are gone."

"_We _can do that," Jourdemayne said, standing tall, unmoved. "Perhaps not your precious Ministry."

"Draco?" Harry moved a step towards him and rested a hand on his shoulder again. "Is there something wrong?"

Draco, staring at the woman in front of him whose journal had just revealed that her Order had discovered ways to go back in time in stable, sturdy loops, found no response to so grand an understatement.


	7. Answers in Time

_Chapter Seven—Answers In Time_

"You _will _tell us more."

"No."

Harry leaned back in the corner of Jourdemayne's home and scratched at the beads of sweat that had popped up beneath his fringe, and stayed that way ever since he began to realize the implications of the time travel that Jourdemayne's Order had discovered. Jourdemayne herself sat in front of him, at the table in the dining room, with her hands folded on it and a simple, severe smile on her face. It was the same smile she had worn since they first began to question her, or, in the state Harry had been reduced to, ordering her to tell them what she knew.

He couldn't help thinking that questioning her in the surroundings of the Ministry might have been more productive, but she hadn't done anything wrong. To bring her in, they would have to charge her with something, and that would reveal not only secrets that she had trusted them with, but secrets that the Ministry might misuse.

Harry didn't trust his superiors to order lunch for a dozen Aurors the right way, never mind with the secrets of time travel.

"If you won't explain when you worked with Nancy or how you think you could have forgotten her when her name is everywhere in your ritual diaries," Draco said, from above and behind Harry, "then will you explain why your Potions lab looks as though a whirlwind has been through it?"

Harry glanced up, a warning dying on his tongue. Draco had agreed to leave the interrogation, or the pleading, or whatever it had become by now, up to Harry while he explored the rest of the house, and he had mentioned how neatly the lab had been cleaned. But seeing the expression on his face, carefully blanked the moment Jourdemayne turned around and stared at him, told Harry to keep silent.

"I have no idea what you mean," Jourdemayne said at last, after a pause long enough to eat an apple in. "I have not worked much in my lab lately. I apologize for the dust."

Harry watched the stiff way she held her head to the side, the way her fingers had curled up under her on the table, and hid a triumphant smile.

"It wasn't the dust," Draco said, and paced towards the table, moving like the stalking predator that Harry sometimes dreamed of him as. Of course, in those dreams he wasn't entirely stalking witnesses. Harry cleared his throat and hoped that both Draco and Jourdemayne were too involved in their own confrontation to notice the flaring red of his face. Luckily, it seemed so. "It was the degree."

"The _degree_." Jourdemayne managed simultaneously to make it sound as though she had never heard of the word and as though it was Draco's fault. Harry was coming to realize that they had underestimated her, as much for her ridiculous mannerisms and fear when they first met her as anything else. "I have no idea what you mean."

"Here," Draco said softly, and stretched out his wand above the table, ignoring the way that Jourdemayne started and crowded against the back of her chair. "Let me show you."

Harry leaned forwards instead, because he was always eager to see what Draco might teach him. Draco swept his wand backwards and forwards, murmuring something that might have been an incantation or only windy words. Harry had learned that Draco kept some of his best spells nonverbal so that others couldn't steal them.

The air above the table wavered and clouded over, like a mirror that someone had splashed milk on. Then an image of Jourdemayne's Potions lab formed. Harry caught his breath. It really was perfect; he'd gone to see the lab himself after the information they found in the ritual diaries, at Draco's insistence, and he knew that he couldn't have recreated an image like this.

Draco turned the image from side to side, pointing with one finger and speaking like a fussy professor, just in case Jourdemayne, who by now was white-knuckled against the back of the chair, didn't quite get it. "See, here and here? The degree is the angle that you can see this from the door. The _door _is the point of reference, it's not visible without that. Congratulations on a thorough cleaning of your brewing area, Madam Jourdemayne." He turned his head so that his teeth showed, and his eyes were full of something like wild lightning. "But not thorough enough for another Potions master to ignore."

Jourdemayne shook her head slightly, her eyes still fastened to the image. "I'm not a Potions master. Not if you are one."

"This apparition?" Draco wagged one finger at the image, accompanied, Harry was sure, by a wand movement that neither he nor Jourdemayne saw, and it vanished. "Play, Madam Jourdemayne. Only play." He bent down towards her. "Either claim right now that the clearing of the lab had something to do with the secrets of your Order, or else explain to us what it was."

"I don't _have _to answer your questions!" Jourdemayne snapped, rising to her feet. "The Aurors cannot command cooperation from anyone, even those with a known crime."

"You have an unknown crime," Draco said, never once unfolding from his lazy posture. "Thanks to our twisted's powers that play with memory, and your own Order's games with time, it could be anything. I wish you to think carefully whether this is something you can confess to us, and then explain your decision to us when we return." He turned and nodded at Harry. Harry blinked but hurriedly started to turn, nodding once at Jourdemayne. He was a bit surprised that she hadn't tried to lie and claim the lab had something to do with her Order, but then, perhaps she was against lying when it came to them, in case it weakened the ritual magic or something.

"Wait."

Harry saw the wolf shark's smile Draco wore, but there was no trace of it when he turned around and bowed gravely to Jourdemayne. "Yes?"

"If I said it was for a good reason, the clearing of the lab," Jourdemayne said, her voice slow as though she was speaking each individual word for the first time in her life, "would you accept that? Would you take me at, at _my _word?"

Draco turned around as though he was considering every individual movement the way Jourdemayne had considered her words, and then slowly nodded. "Perhaps," he said. "Perhaps. It would depend on what the reason for the clearing was, of course."

Harry reached out and slid a hand down behind Draco's back, not quite touching the spine but keeping it hovering there. He thought actually touching him would be an obvious signal to Jourdemayne. In any case, the smaller one worked. Draco fell silent and waited to see what Harry would do, if only out of astonishment, Harry thought.

"She wants to tell us that it was for a good reason, and nothing else," Harry said, his eyes locked on Jourdemayne's. "That's what you're saying, isn't it? That you want us to be able to trust you that far?"

Jourdemayne licked her lips, swallowed, nodded. "You have no idea how much this would help me," she said. "I need—I need time. The same thing that is involved in this case from the beginning, from the other side. Please, help me."

Harry hesitated and looked at Draco. His face was blank, his arms folded and his head lowered as if he had thought of something distressing. But he said nothing. He seemed to leave it up to Harry to make the decision, since he was the one who had started this conversation in the first place.

_Very well. _Harry faced Jourdemayne and nodded. "You need to consider one thing before we agree," he said.

Jourdemayne looked up with her face shining. "Just one?"

Harry gritted his teeth and reminded himself not to shout. There might be a real reason that Jourdemayne was acting as if she needed a reprieve, rather than simple shame, and if he shouted at her, any information she might have to give them could be taken from them forever. In the end, solving this case was more important than getting his own way.

Besides, he thought that if Jourdemayne was capable of seriousness when she was talking about her Order and their rituals, she might be capable of it elsewhere.

"Consider that our lives might be in danger," he told her gently. "And other peoples' lives, if, as she's done to us and to you, this twisted erases their memories of her, or travels through time around them. There have been documented cases of people playing with time hurting not only themselves but also others who were in the area when the spell was cast. I understand why you want to keep your secrets. But by keeping the identity of this twisted secret, you might be hurting other people who've done nothing to harm you."

Jourdemayne's lips quivered for a second. Then she clamped them shut and said fiercely, "I won't—I would _never _hurt someone like that."

"Not even to protect your Order?" Draco's question slid across and insinuated itself into the air.

Jourdemayne gave him a steady, anguished look, and then faced Harry. "Really," she insisted. "Please believe me. I would never do anything to hurt others. I would have refused to study time travel if I thought we couldn't control it."

Harry bit his tongue on the desire to say that _everyone _who studied time travel thought that. He leaned back against the wall and nodded. "Then we'll accept your word for now," he said. "We'll come back in a week—"

Draco hissed.

"In three days," Harry corrected himself, "and we'll await your answer then." He gave her a little bow and turned away, walking towards the front door. He counted six heartbeats before Draco followed him.

Draco waited to say anything until they were outside the house and walking towards the Apparition point, which was beyond the edge of Jourdemayne's warded garden. Then he murmured, in the idle way that he had of talking about something that had truly displeased him, "We'll accept your word for now?"

Harry held up his hand; he didn't think Jourdemayne was ordinarily the kind paranoid enough to put up wards that spied on what people in her garden were saying, but she might have become so since those notes started appearing. Draco blinked, and then looked as if he wished he would have thought of that himself. He kept silent until they were out of the garden, at least, and then Harry turned to him and nodded.

"Did you see any alternative with her?" he asked. "She wasn't going to tell us. Maybe she does have a good reason, and in that case, we've given her time to figure out another way of handling it. Maybe she's afraid, and she needs time to gather her courage. And maybe it has to do with her Order, and if that's true, we already _know _she won't talk. It costs us nothing to wait a little and see if she'll confess the truth of her own free will."

"Except possibly our lives, if her information is vital," Draco said, his eyes narrowed. "Except possibly the lives of other people this twisted might kill."

"She hasn't killed anyone yet," Harry began.

"How do we know?" Draco demanded with quiet intensity, leaning forwards. "If she can manage to make people forget that she exists, she could commit _murder _right in front of them, and they wouldn't know what happened. And something else worries me, Harry. We have no evidence that her powers only extend to herself."

Harry stared at him. "What do you mean?"

"I _mean_, that she might be able to make us forget that other people existed, too. What happens if there are murder victims lying out there, unavenged, unknown? What if there are people who think someone known to them simply disappeared, and every day they're stepping over the dead body?"

Harry said nothing for a moment. Then he reached out and took Draco's arm. Draco let him do it, but he stepped away from Harry the moment they arrived at the Apparition point outside the Ministry and resumed his stare.

"You come up with some of the most disquieting ideas I've ever heard," Harry muttered, scrubbing at the back of his neck with one hand. "I—I don't know, Draco. It might be true. But so far, we don't have any evidence that it is."

"Of course," Draco said smoothly, and walked into the Ministry. Harry followed him, but Draco didn't speak again until they were at the doors of the Socrates office, and he was pushing them open, smiling back at Harry over his shoulder with teeth a fox would envy. "By all means, let us have _evidence_."

"I don't understand you," Harry snapped, and shut the doors behind them. No one else was in the office right now, thank Merlin. Harry wasn't actually shy about discussing their cases in front of the other Aurors—they'd had to have Warren and Jenkins help them on the Larkin case—but he had had enough of the others hearing them arguing. "I only want to make sure that we know what this twisted is doing, as much as we can. It would be awful if she is murdering people and disposing of them like that, but we don't know yet. She could be creeping from house to house of these Order members and trying to find shelter with them, the way she's tried with Jourdemayne. She could really have been a prisoner of the blue-eyed twisted, the way she told me she was, and now he's captured her again. We can't say anything one way or the other until we have some proof in front of us."

Draco turned around to face him, hands clasped in front of him as though he was going to seize a weapon and use it to dig a hole through Harry's body. "I am referring to the twisted, of course, and the way that you seem inclined to spare their lives even when they're as profoundly dangerous as this Nancy is. But I am also referring to the way that you let Jourdemayne walk away from us."

"Pressing her was the wrong thing to do right now," Harry insisted, leaning back against his desk and doing his best to relax his lungs with each breath. "I _know _that. I'm _certain _of it. All the instincts that I've developed when I interview witnesses were speaking up. She might tell us something later. Not now."

Draco bowed his head, eyes gleaming like those of a bull about to charge. "Your instincts? Or the same kind of morality that encourages you to forgive the twisted and spare them? You would spare everyone, it seems, Harry, except me and yourself."

Harry sighed and wondered how he could make Draco see the truth. In the end, there was no way, he thought, not if Draco was determined not to believe him, just as there was no way to force Jourdemayne to tell the truth right now when she didn't want to.

"If you think that," he said, "then I can't clear myself of the charge."

"Yes, you can," Draco said, and stepped forwards.

"Do you want me to remove myself from the case?" Harry asked in bewilderment, since he could think of no other way that he could do something Draco wanted. "I'll go and ask Okazes for that if you want, but he refused to let me work by myself for long. I don't think he'd want you to go without a partner, either."

Draco stood there, his breath coming out fast enough to make him sound sick. Harry met his eyes and wondered what the fuck was going to happen next.

* * *

Draco wanted…

Part of him wanted to wait. Wanted to trust Harry, wanted to believe that Jourdemayne would confess the truth to them because of Harry's tactics and that they would catch the twisted as partners, the way they always had.

But part of him wanted _more. _Wanted some assurance that Harry cared most about him, more than about his terrible morality and more than for the comfort of witnesses like Jourdemayne. The way Harry had held her hand and whispered to her, and the way that he spoke as though he thought Draco wanted to kill innocents when they hunted down the twisted, wasn't terribly convincing on that front.

He wanted to go ahead and use the weapon that he had promised himself to hold in reserve.

"Prove that you trust me most of all," he said, aware of the world spinning around him and Harry watching him with wondering eyes. Well, he could go on wondering all he liked. What Draco was most interested in was his honesty. "So far, the secrets you've told me have been under duress. You told me about Lionel because you wanted to save my life and sanity from Alto. You told me about other cases because Mind-Healer Estillo recommended that you do so. I want you to talk about something else."

Harry wrinkled his forehead. "If I tell you about them just because you're asking, then that's still under duress, isn't it? Or not of my own free will?"

"No." Draco shook his head. His mouth felt charged with lightning, he was so eager. "I will promise to think of it as your own free will. But you have to _tell me_."

Harry, eyes bright and cautious, finally nodded. "All right."

"Who was Lauren Hale to you?"

Harry flinched back, and then hissed like one of the snakes he used to speak to at Hogwarts. Draco, his heart pounding crazily, met his eyes and thought with less triumph than he had expected to be able to feel, _So my parents were right._

"I won't ask where you heard about that," Harry whispered, "because plenty of people know that we were partnered, and any one of them could have told you. But I did think better of you than that you would ask about it."

Draco shook his head. There was something pressing against the back of his mind that he thought would turn into regret if he let it, but _only _if he let it. He had asked the question, and he thought he had a right to know.

"I'm your partner," he said. "I had the right to know about Lionel, since it was a factor that influenced your working with me. And now? Lauren? Or should I call her Hale, since you hardly seem disposed to call her by her first name?"

Harry stood there, gazing steadily at him. Then he shook his head. "Why bother? The same person who mentioned the name to you can tell you the story, and what you'll get from them was essentially true. There was never anything hidden between us, the way that there was with me and Lionel."

Draco frowned. "Come, come, Harry. You said that you would tell me this freely. You asked. I told you what you could do to get me to trust you again. And now you're refusing?"

"I'm asking you to withdraw the question, rather." Harry seemed to stand taller, though really, Draco didn't see what right he had to do that. He was the one who was making proposals that could put their lives in danger, including leaving Jourdemayne free not to tell the truth. "Please, Draco. If you—if you care about me, as a partner and more, then pull it away, and let me tell you something else." He spoke in a low voice, and caught Draco's eye with a bright desperation that made him look like a frightened bird for a moment. "I would appreciate it if you would."

Draco bit his lip, and felt the trickle of blood down the back of his throat. He had once lived for moments like these, with someone else at his mercy. He'd had few of them since the war, and even fewer once he entered Auror training and met people who thought he was as far beneath them for his name as others thought he was above them.

"No," he said. "I have some reason to distrust you lately, Harry, with you putting the supposed innocence of imaginary twisted above my _life_. I want to know what happened between you and Hale, and I want to know _now_. Was it another crush? One that she had on you, this time, instead of the other way around?"

Harry seemed to freeze from the inside out. He nodded deliberately and put his hands down on the desk in front of him, but Draco didn't think he was nodding in answer to Draco's question. The pressure of the possible regret became stronger. He ignored it and continued to watch Harry.

"Not a crush," Harry said quietly. "Ron had decided to quit the Aurors, and I was moping around and feeling sorry for myself. I would have preferred to stay on desk duty than be assigned another partner, right then. But it's always suited the Ministry's interests to have me working in the field if I was going to work for them at all. To show the public that the Chosen One is bravely defending them and all that. So they partnered me with Hale.

"She's not a bad Auror. She's not a bad person. But she's cold pure-blood. The kind of haughty person that Macgeorge is, except even less relatable. She let me know that she despised me for my mother and considered that my arrests and even my exploits during the war were exaggerated.

"I went overboard trying to prove myself to her, because she goaded me and because I wanted my partner to trust me enough to save my life if we got into a dangerous situation. On one of the cases, something—went wrong. I nearly killed her. It was accidentally, but she decided it was on purpose, and she complained. After that, they yanked me away from her and partnered me with Lionel."

"Not so easily," Draco murmured, quietly, but loud enough, he hoped, to silence the clanging alarm bells in his own head. "I want to _know_, Potter. What happened?"

"That was what she called me, too," Harry said distantly. "Potter. In exactly that tone of voice.

"We were hunting a Dreamless Sleep addict who'd started murdering his suppliers with the Killing Curse. He set up a maze, of sorts, and filled it with traps. Lauren disarmed the first two of them and then mentioned that I was being useless. I went ahead of her, determined to spring the next one and show her that I could disarm it before it injured either of us. It sprang before I was ready, and a poisoned arrow went flying at her head. I stopped it with a Shield Charm, but it was a near thing. She blamed me for it."

He glanced into Draco's eyes. "And now that you know, Malfoy, I reckon we can move on, and that's the end of it. I'll go report to Okazes on Jourdemayne's reluctance, so that he'll understand our not pulling her in today is entirely at my insistence." He turned and walked away with stiff strides in the direction of the door.

"Wait," Draco thought to say, after a long moment of silent wonder that Harry was calling _him _by his last name.

"No," Harry replied, and stepped out into the corridor with a quiet but final click.

It left Draco feeling that he had lost something, and unsure exactly what.


	8. A Breakage in the Trust

Thank you again for all the reviews!

_Chapter Eight—A Breakage in the Trust_

Harry sat down and closed his eyes. He'd just spent the past half an hour scribbling insults and outrage at Draco—

_Well, I reckon I should call him Malfoy, now, since that seems to be what he wants me to do—_

In his private diary, and now he locked the book with a complex wave of his wand and sent it to land on the mantle where it usually sat. The worst of the blood-boiling anger was out of him, but he felt limp and weary, as he often did when he'd written that much of it down, and he didn't really want to move.

_Eat? _That sounded good, but Harry didn't think he was up to cooking anything complicated. Waving his wand from the chair towards the kitchen, he pulled a few slices of bread out of their drawer, toasted them with magic, and covered them with generous helpings of butter, then floated them directly to his chair. There was no plate, but he took a certain pleasure in eating through them and dropping crumbs everywhere.

_Malfoy _wouldn't approve.

Then again, it didn't seem as though he approved of most things Harry did. Harry rubbed the back of his neck and frowned. Was that a good enough reason to do things like eat crumbs in the middle of his drawing room?

In the end, he shrugged and ate them anyway. It was _his _bloody drawing room. Malfoy didn't have to come over if he didn't want to.

He Vanished the crumbs when he was finished and turned towards his bedroom, where he kept the files that he had brought home for more extended study later. Right now, he wanted to look at what they had on Nancy and compare her to other twisted. She had a symbol, she had a flaw, but she didn't have companions. He wanted to make sure that there weren't other cases like that before he dismissed her as different.

_See, Draco? _he thought, grimly pleased with himself, as he sat down in front of a pile of folders and notes, and reached out to pull the first of them towards him. _I can be methodical, too, when I want, and not everything depends on your way of doing things._

Maybe it was also childish to talk to someone who couldn't hear him. But Draco had made it clear that all he wanted was the polite façade of a partnership, the only thing Harry could give someone who insisted on him telling his secrets and then acted disgusted with him when he found out what they were.

_Stop concentrating on him._

That was the best advice Harry had heard so far from the inside of his skull. He bowed his head over the notes and began to work.

* * *

"Your name is Lauren Hale?"

The woman in front of Draco glanced up at him, and then turned her head back to the vial in front of her, which was filled with crusted grey flakes that Draco recognized as the remains of a failed Interrogation Potion. She made a quick note on parchment before she asked, "Who wants to know?"

Draco studied her back. She stood tall and straight, confident, in a way that reminded him of Pansy or his mother. Of course, she was pure-blood, like them; she would have the training to permit her to carry that confidence off.

She had long, straight brown hair, looped up in a tail that would keep it from falling in her face but which also emphasized her cheekbones and chin. Draco thought, in her case, that she might have taken more care not to look so much like a skeleton.

"My name is Draco Malfoy," Draco said, and saw the corner of Hale's eye twitch with recognition. "I've come to talk to you about the time that you were partnered with Harry Potter."

"Oh, yes, you're partnered with him now, aren't you?" Hale asked, not turning a hair and not looking away from the vial. "If you want me to take him back, then I'm afraid that you're too late. I've already made the decision to join Virgil Corps." They were the group of Aurors, Draco knew, that was called in the most often on Potions-related crimes. "Potter wouldn't have a place there. His incompetence is ridiculous."

Draco bit his teeth against the urge to defend Harry, and said, "No. I'm content enough with him, I suppose. But I want to hear why you stopped being partnered with him. He told me something I can't believe is true."

"That story about how he saved my life?" Hale made a small notation in a column and finally turned around to regard him. "Only because he endangered it first, and showed at the same time what an incompetent Auror he was."

"He told me that he'd only saved your life from a trap he set off," Draco said, and dismissed the several defensive things he could have said, leaning back against her table to return her calm, cool stare. "Is that true?"

Hale shrugged. "Yes. It was a trap that anyone else—for example, me—could have seen and known not to set off. But Potter has a confidence problem. He thinks he has to demonstrate to anyone and everyone that he has it, that he's good, because at one point someone said that he couldn't be because he was the Boy-Who-Lived. And he blundered into the trap. That he saved my life was only right, because he was the reason I was in danger. In that maze with a different partner, nothing like that would have happened."

Draco stared at her. She stared back. There was nothing passionate about her gaze, no flush to her face, nothing that suggested she was lying or trying to make herself look good to Harry's current partner.

_Harry was right. She is cold._

That was a trait that Draco had often admired in pure-bloods, and had once thought essential for the kind of woman he would take as a bride. But faced with it now, he had to fight to keep from stiffening in revulsion.

"Was that the only thing you wanted to ask me?" Hale asked, and glanced back at her research with something like yearning in her eyes, the kind that at least reassured Draco she was a real person instead of an animated statue. "The outcome of a case depends on what I can discover about this potion, and how it went wrong."

Draco took one look at the vial, and sniffed. "They obviously added too much barley sugar. You can't tell that from a glance?"

Hale went still, although most people wouldn't have noticed; it was only that she kept her head turned in the wrong direction for a moment too long, and then faced Draco with her best effort at a smile flickering on her lips. "I'm still in the middle of my tests for Virgil Corps," she said pleasantly. "So, no, I could do with some more instruction."

She said nothing, but Draco felt the invitation lying in the air between them. If he offered that instruction, then it was possible that she would tell him more about Harry and the reasons she had ended their partnership.

Draco felt a moment's great temptation. That would be easy, wouldn't it? A simple trade. He knew so much about potions that teaching her would be a simple effort and not take much time, and she had what he dearly wanted. And she was a pure-blood, too, from the same background as him. There would be none of the silly negotiation or emotional nonsense that he might have expected from a Gryffindor.

He wanted to know more about Harry's past. He wanted to know why Harry hadn't fought the termination of the partnership, how ashamed he had been—although Hale didn't look as if she was the best at observation of emotions—whether he had fought with Hale on some of the same terms that he and Draco used, and so on.

But it was Harry's voice that Draco wanted to hear saying those facts, and Harry's lips he wanted to see shaping them, and Harry's eyes he wanted to see blink or darken or close or glance away.

"Too much barley sugar," he repeated, and turned away. Again, there was a long moment of cold silence behind him before Hale spoke to his back, in a voice so flat and chilled it would have done for one of the Muggle inventions that Draco had heard of, called robots.

"You should watch out for Potter. He might be nice to you as long as he likes you, but he can set up barriers like no one's business the minute he stops deciding that you're worthy of being partnered with him."

Draco turned around and opened his mouth to dispute that, but Hale was facing her instruments again, her frown faint but visible as she studied the notes she had made and then the vial. He would look ridiculous opposing her when she already seemed to have put him out of her mind, even if it was only _seemed._

So Draco swallowed his pride and took the long way back to the Socrates office, considering as he went what he should do.

He had no proof that Harry's parting from Hale had been any more complicated or embarrassing than the story Harry had related. He had no proof that his parents' dark hints were true.

But still he wanted both if he could have them: Harry and his inheritance. He decided that perhaps the time was right for firecalling his parents and giving them a mixture of truth and lies that they would swallow eagerly.

Not pure truth. He had conceded enough to many people in his life, including them.

* * *

Harry leaned back with a sigh. No, most of the files on the twisted that the Socrates office had accumulated over the years—including old ones on cases that occurred before the Ministry came up with the classification of twisted, but put in that category once it was invented—included both companions and symbol. Some of the recent ones, like the Alto case, included only companions, no symbol.

Only one or two had symbol and no companions, and those were the results of muddled research, said later notes appended to the files, and twisted who had powers that worked on the minds of their victims. One could not be sure that the original observations were correct.

Harry leaned back and shut his eyes, trying to remember if he had seen anything around or with Nancy. But that was the problem. He couldn't remember anything of his encounter with her, only wandering to find Draco and then waking up at the table in the interrogation room with the scribbled notes in front of him.

He sighed and shook his head. _All right. Try something else. Try to think of anything unusual that happened to you in the days around or before that. Nancy could have been haunting the Department before her meeting with you. If Draco's right, she could make you forget something else. Any other strange headaches that you can remember? Any times when you seemed to lose time, and wake up in a place you hadn't expected to be? _

Of course, his mind went immediately back to the night that mysterious tugging had pulled him out of bed and to Grimmauld Place to look at the tapestry. And of course, he hadn't seen anything wrong with it.

That made Harry frown. That couldn't have anything to do with Nancy, could it? Because she couldn't affect written things, and the tapestry would have preserved whatever damage she had inscribed on it, including the morning star symbol, even if she had managed to make Harry forget seeing her. Besides, why did she have to get rid of the memory of herself in the Ministry later, after she talked to him, if she had already erased his memory of her in the Black house?

Then Harry's eyes popped open.

_Writing stays the same, but it doesn't mean that we have the memory of what it means, even seeing it right in front of us. She couldn't erase the ritual diaries that Jourdemayne wrote, but she _did _erase her memory of working with her, and what her name meant._

In rising excitement, Harry walked out his front door and to the nearest Apparition point. He could Apparate to the inside of the house if he wanted to, as he had the night the tugging started, but he didn't want to. He wanted to go over the house pace by pace and look for clues.

Even if, as yet, he had no idea what he expected to find.

He spun on the spot and Apparated.

* * *

"This call is most unexpected, Draco." He had reached only his mother from his home Floo, but she was smiling at him in the same smooth manner that Hale had used, that Pansy would use, that so many pure-bloods would. It was different from the way that Harry smiled, violently different, as if he didn't consider the expression merely a means of hiding his emotions.

Draco did not shake his head to clear the memory out, but only because he didn't want his mother to think that he was trying to refuse her claim. "Yes," he said. "But I have learned more about Lauren Hale, both from her and from Potter." Calling him _Harry, _he thought, would only prejudice his case at the moment.

"Ah?" His mother's eyes had brightened, like the heads of nails catching the light.

"What he did was stupid," Draco acknowledged. "But I do not know that it should be enough to make me give him up, particularly when I have not come to the same sort of disgrace while partnered with him."

His mother's face went smooth and cold, the brightness leaving her eyes. "How I wish that your father was here to discuss this with you," she murmured. "I, of course, have little understanding of the precise laws that govern the Malfoy inheritance."

Draco stared at her. His mother stared back, so small, so contained, so calm, that Draco began to wonder if he shouldn't have firecalled at all. They had told him that there was something damaging about what Hale could say, and so far, Draco had heard nothing that would make him think less of Harry. Perhaps there was something else, something that Harry had reason to hide and Hale would never discuss with him without payment—

Then Draco shook his head impatiently. He was being stupid, thinking that there was more there without the _hint _of more there.

He was falling into the trap that his parents had always set for him and which he had come to dread: thinking that their perceptions were the definition of the world, and if they seemed wrong, it was the world's fault for not living up to them.

"No," he said, loudly enough that his mother's eyebrows twitched. "I know that you know as much about the inheritance as he does, Mother. You would have made yourself familiar with all the documents before you married him, after all, just in case you had a child that was faulty somehow."

"The House of Black does not produce such children," his mother said, as gentle as snowfall. "And of course your father knows more about it, Draco, since he was born into this family. If you will wait a short time, then perhaps—"

"I should have known," Draco told her, and kept his voice low enough that she might miss the cutting edge to it, although she was a fool if she did. "I should have fucking _known._"

"I will thank you not to use such language to me." His mother laid her hand on her chest, underneath the thick necklace of silver that coiled around her throat. Draco couldn't remember her wearing such a thing before his parents had exiled him, but the time had passed when he could have asked her about it.

"I'll tell you whatever I want," Draco said grimly. "Because that's the way you decided to handle _me_, wasn't it? You decided that you could tell me whatever you wanted, and I would obey you and trot off like a good little puppet. You never cared about letting me remain an Auror. The only thing you cared about was separating me from Harry. Because still, after all these years, the grudge you bear against him is the more important thing. Though Merlin knows _where _the grudge comes from, since he testified to let us all remain as free of Azkaban as possible. And you lied for him, Mother."

Narcissa looked at him with great liquid eyes and said, "You are overwrought, Draco, and prone to not making much sense when you are, which often happens. I will firecall you again when your father comes home. Perhaps then you will understand that—"

"I'll understand whatever I fucking well _want_ to," Draco said, in a low, violent voice, ignoring his mother's faint sound of protest. "You turned against Harry after the war. You decided that he shouldn't have—I don't _know _what. I reckon him killing the Dark Lord was so great an offense that it overrode all the things he did for you. So you decided that you hated him, and the Aurors, and the elements of the Ministry you think mistreated you."

"We did not want you to become one of those who have used us shamefully," Narcissa said, not moving a muscle in her face other than the ones on her jaw.

Draco shook his head. "I could have accepted your dislike of Aurors, and the way that you cast me off. I did for seven years, after all." He leaned forwards and stared into his mother's eyes. "But now I want a straight answer. What was the point of telling me about Hale? What was the point of telling me that I could have my Auror career as long as I gave up having Harry as a partner? I want the truth. The _truth_, Mother," he added, when Narcissa's lips pursed.

Narcissa sighed as if she didn't understand why Draco _would _persist in this, but answered. "We know that you will go nowhere as long as you stay with him, Draco. Professionally, or—personally."

He had been meant to notice the hesitation before that last word, Draco knew, but he could not keep himself from asking. "What does that mean?"

"We want you to marry the right kind of woman," Narcissa said, staring straight into his eyes, her face not more neutral than her voice. "We heard the rumors that you were growing closer to Potter, the kind of closeness that we could not condone or desire _if _we condoned or desired grandchildren. We want you to marry someone who can give us those things."

"As always, then," Draco said, speaking before he thought, because the words piled up on his tongue and tumbled out of his mouth like snow down a hillside. "You want to have control of my life, and that overrides anything I want personally."

"You must consider, Draco," his mother said. She had her hands clasped in front of her now, and a severe look on her face that had usually been followed by a scolding for not caring about the flowers or the house-elves. "Do you want a man who cannot give you a family? Do you want to pass your years in loneliness until your father and I die and someone else inherits the estate, someone suitable? I am persuaded that neither option is truly what you desire. Sometimes we must give up something to gain something. Your father and I are reconciled to your Auror career. You must be reconciled to our choice of your wife."

Draco shut his eyes and stood there, his heart pounding, in exquisite silence.

It always came down to this, with his parents, or so it seemed as his mind sped back over the years. The subtle threats modulating into bargains and into treatises on the proper way to behave. The faux courtesy and sorrow when they had to impose limits on him. The praise that was always measured and tempered with scolding, so that he knew that he could never entirely please them. The constant, constant, _constant _refrain of "not-good-enough."

Nothing would change. If they had decided they could tolerate his career, then they would only put more pressure somewhere else. Draco knew he would be allowed to reject, once or twice, the woman they had decided on for his wife, but they would win in the end. They would tighten the chains, hint at the loss of his inheritance again, remind him that they had been greatly tolerant in accepting him back even though he had done nothing wrong.

And so he would come to believe that he had, and in the end, he would lose what he had gained.

Because he had gained something in the years that he had spent by himself. Strange how long it had taken him to see it. The ability to think, the ability to reason, the determination to keep going even when someone in the Ministry told him off for being a Malfoy or the memory of his parents intruded.

He would give up Harry if he went back to them, but he would also give up other things, not a good deal less precious.

"The answer is no," he said, opening his eyes and smiling at his mother. "Tell that to Father when you see him. The offer is tempting, and poisoned. I would never get back what I would give up to you."

His mother stared at him for long moments, her eyes so set and cold that they made Draco shiver. Then she nodded once and turned her head, and the fire went out, ceasing to exist.

Draco stood there, rubbing his hands, before he took his wand out and cast _Incendio. _He suspected that was not the last he would hear of this, not if his parents had been desperate enough about their lack of an heir to approach him in the first place.

But this time, he was forearmed.

* * *

Harry knelt down in the air—he had cast a spell that would let him hover, with some difficulty, a few inches off the floor—and examined the thick dust outside the tapestry room. He cursed a moment later and straightened up, staring at the walls and wondering if the morning star symbol could be there.

So far, he had found nothing in his investigation through Grimmauld Place, no sign that Nancy had been there or ever would be. Harry shook his head and stepped into the tapestry room itself, which he had left for last. There was always the chance that she had worked the magic on him somewhere else, and if so, the symbol would have appeared in a different room, too.

There was the tapestry, looking like always. Harry floated near it and studied the names he knew on it. Sirius. Narcissa Malfoy. Draco. The usual ones. He still saw nothing that he had forgotten, that Nancy had made him forget, sufficient for the ancestral Black magic to drag him out of bed and plant him in front of this thing.

_Well, then maybe the magic pulled you here for some other reason, and it has nothing to do with Nancy at all._

Harry sighed. That was possible. When he was in the middle of a case, he had a bad habit to connect everything he looked at to the case, and half the time, it didn't relate. He started to turn away from the tapestry.

There was a flash of light behind his eyes, and a crumpling sensation in his head.

Harry whirled back to the tapestry. He had no idea why Nancy would need to pull that memory-altering trick again, since he couldn't see her even if she _was _here, but it must be important, it must have something to do with the tapestry after all!

But once again, it was normal when he stared at it. Sirius and Narcissa Malfoy, the only Blacks he would have reason to be familiar with. He blew out a deeply disgusted breath and walked downstairs.

He would have to go over the case notes again, and then talk with Macgeorge and Rudie, maybe even Warren and Jenkins, about what to do next. For a twisted this dangerous, he sensed that he would need the help of all the other Socrates Aurors.


	9. Watcher in Oblivion

Thank you again for all the reviews!

_Chapter Nine—Watcher in Oblivion_

"Nasty day for headaches."

Harry blinked and glanced up. Macgeorge had come in early, just a few minutes after he had, and stood rubbing her temple in front of her desk. Harry knew that she often spoke scornfully to him, but he decided to risk an overture now, since it might be the same thing that had been bothering him. "Like a crumpling sensation behind your eyes?" he asked. "And a sort of flash of light?"

Macgeorge turned and stared at him, a less-than-flattering gape on her face. _Or maybe I _should_ consider it flattering, _Harry thought wryly, _given the sheer number of things that she might say to me instead of doing that._

"Yes," Macgeorge whispered. "Potter, do you know what's causing it? I don't understand. Rudie said that she'd experienced something like it, too, but I don't know what we could have eaten. We never share meals together, and we've done separate research and interviews for the last few days, too."

Harry hesitated. Then he decided he could trust her _this _far. At least the Aurors in Socrates Corps would have each other's backs about the strange and disturbing cases they handled, and from some of the encounters Macgeorge had described, she wouldn't disbelieve in one specific twisted's powers, either.

"Here," he said, and pushed the notes he had been making about Nancy that morning across the desk to her.

Macgeorge read them with her head cocked to the side and a frown forming on her face. Harry could practically see the objections forming along with it, so he contented himself with turning off to the side and casting spells to conjure more sugar into his tea. For some reason, he felt the need of that this morning.

"A twisted who can travel in time, and perhaps make people forget her," Macgeorge muttered when that was done. "Well. But why would she need to make _us _forget her? You're the Auror working on the case."

Harry shrugged and pulled the file back to him. "I don't know. But I actually think that her primary flaw is the power she has over memory. Studying time travel could have been something that particular Order was doing and that she was involved in, not something related to her magic."

"Hmmph. Maybe," Macgeorge said, and seated herself on the edge of her desk, swinging her legs. Harry raised his eyebrows—he rarely saw her so informal—and then wondered if he should because she might take it the wrong way, but luckily, she didn't look up. "Do you know how you're going to capture her?"

Harry grimaced and shook his head. "I have to go back and talk to Jourdemayne first. With time, she might have thought of something else that she'll feel comfortable telling me. But after that, if it turns out that she really is as formidable as I think she is, it would be nice to have some backup." He eyed Macgeorge expectantly.

She gave him a sharp-toothed smile. "Working as the only Socrates Auror without a partner must get lonely sometimes, huh?"

Harry shrugged. He had never really wanted another partner after Lionel, and for once he had used his fame to his advantage, convincing the Ministry that he didn't need one. But he had to admit, sometimes it would be nice to have someone else there who could cast the curse at the escaping suspect's back, or interview a witness in a different style than the one Harry used, or just discuss ideas with him.

Macgeorge nodded. "Rudie's out on that research expedition, as I said, but I personally don't think this case will come out to anything at all. There are too many contradictions in the witnesses' stories."

"That in itself can be a sign of a twisted," Harry quoted grandly, from the files that every Socrates Auror was given on joining the Corps.

"Not when two of them admit to being drunk and one of them also thinks he saw a blue winged unicorn the same night," Macgeorge said flatly. "Only _sometimes_." She grinned at Harry again. "Let me know if you still need help this afternoon."

Harry rose and tapped the file against his forehead. "Aye aye, madam. The interview with Jourdemayne is the only thing that should really occupy my time today, and one way or the other, I ought to be back by noon."

* * *

Draco stood in the middle of the Socrates office with his heart beating like a cold drum in his ears, and stared back and forth from Harry to Macgeorge. He didn't think they were ignoring him. They were _unseeing _him. They looked past him. They didn't turn their bodies to avoid him; they simply didn't walk through the space where he stood. And from the words they exchanged, they seemed to think that Harry had been without a partner since he joined this particular Corps.

Nancy had been at them.

Of course, Draco could see why she might have wanted to erase his memory from Harry's mind. Destroy the effectiveness of the Auror team hunting her, the ones who had managed to come up with the best conclusions about her and her powers so far, and she might never be captured. And it made as much sense to erase his memory from Harry's mind as it did to erase Harry's from his.

But why go after Macgeorge, and Rudie, and likely the other Aurors they shared the office with, Warren and Jenkins? Draco shook his head. Unless Nancy was simply covering the bases by making sure that no one else would ask Harry where his partner was, although one would think that leaving Harry to answer awkward questions would destroy his effectiveness, as well.

_I don't know yet, _Draco thought, and then turned for the door. _But there's someone else who might be able to tell me, someone who remembers me, and who I have to move fast to get to before Nancy reaches._

* * *

Harry had his head buried in his files as he walked down the main Ministry corridor, usually something that other people were able to see in time and avoid. Sometimes he felt that he'd taken Hermione's lessons too much to heart when he became part of the Ministry, he thought, shaking his head. There was such a thing as too much reading and studying, and he must be approaching saturation point.

But this morning, someone didn't avoid him. Harry collided with a solid form in the sort of slippery robes that Healers wore, and stepped back with a gasp, shaking his head. "I'm so sorry," he murmured, ducking his head and feeling his cheeks burn. "I could have watched where I was going."

The woman, who looked vaguely familiar and wore the robes of a Mind-Healer, smiled at him, but didn't walk away immediately, the way that Harry had assumed she would. Instead, she laid a hand on his arm and said, "It's been a long time since you've come by for an appointment, Auror Potter. Did you want to start making them to see me without Auror Malfoy again? I can understand the impulse, but would advise against it."

Harry stared at her with his mouth open. "_Lucius Malfoy _is an Auror?" he asked, dazed. "And you think that he wants to have appointments with me, for some reason?"

The Mind-Healer blinked and stared in turn, although she didn't let her mouth fall open. Harry became aware of how his jaw was dangling and shut it in embarrassment, shaking his head. But that still didn't make her words make any more sense.

_Shit, if Malfoy can be accepted into Auror training now, then they really are taking anyone they can get their hands on. I reckon Ron will be happy to hear that, though. _It had partially been Ron's conviction that the Ministry was all corrupt that had resulted in him quitting the Aurors.

_And subjecting me to a series of piss-poor partners. Well, all right, two of them. And I can't call Lionel's work piss-poor, just his ending. _Harry swallowed down the lump of emotion that the thought of Lionel's death always brought to his throat, and wondered if someone had told the Mind-Healer to talk to him about that.

He was just framing a polite denial and defense of his mental health when the Mind-Healer said, "I meant Draco Malfoy. Auror Draco Malfoy. Your partner. Did you have a quarrel?"

Harry blinked some more. He tried to recall if he'd ever heard of anyone else named Malfoy besides Lucius and Narcissa, but he didn't think so. He knew that Lucius had been an only child and so had his father, which would mean precious few cousins or opportunities for other people to have the name, and of course Lucius and his wife had never had any children.

"I don't know who you're talking about," he said, as gently and as courteously as he could. Perhaps the Mind-Healer had been into her own potions. That happened sometimes, with the ones who heard the worst stories of abuse and attacks from the Aurors they counseled. "Do you want me to accompany you to the Head Auror's office? That might be the best plan. You can check the rolls there."

"_Legilimens._"

Harry stiffened and glared at her, but reckoned, slowly, that it might be all right. _Might._ Mind-Healers were licensed by the Ministry to use that kind of magic. It would have been nice if she had asked first, though.

"How fascinating," the Mind-Healer said, when she had spent a few minutes staring into his eyes, and evidently the depths of his brain. "The memory of Draco Malfoy appears to have been—_obliterated _from your mind. Yes. Obliterated is not a bad word. Would you follow me?" She turned and began to lead Harry down the corridor.

"What's your name?" Harry asked, standing still. He didn't want to go anywhere with a Mind-Healer who might be mad. His enemies had tried that a time or two, sending someone after him disguised as a Healer. The Alto case, for example.

"Estillo," said the Mind-Healer, and looked at him with her head on one side. "I don't think that whoever did this to you meant to take that. But because the memories that you have of me are all connected with your memories of Auror Malfoy, destroying them destroyed the ones that held me as well. Fascinating."

Harry thought, irritably, that only a Mind-Healer would find the destruction done to someone else's mind "fascinating" instead of disturbing. "All _right_," he said. "But—what does that mean for me? Am I going to be walking around with a hole in my mind for the rest of my life? A hole that I don't even feel?"

Because that was what it was like. Estillo was talking about something he had lost, and if that was true, then Harry wanted it back, because it wasn't anyone else's to _take_. But he felt no gaping wound, nothing he couldn't identify, nothing that he couldn't imagine. He had always been alone in his work since Lionel's death, and that was the way he liked it. If nothing else, if he got lonely, he always had Ron and Hermione.

"I don't know," Estillo said. "I've never seen anything like this before. And if you really don't remember…" She turned and began to walk in another direction, one that led to the corridor that Harry usually avoided, because it contained the Healers' offices. "It wouldn't do any good to show you the records of Draco Malfoy's existence in the Head Auror's office, which was what I planned to do. I will show you something else instead, and have other Healers look at you to confirm my conclusions."

That was new, in Harry's experience, a Healer who explained what she was doing instead of just rushing ahead and doing it. He hesitated, then gave in and followed. At the very least, another Healer might be able to confirm that Estillo was delusional or high on potions, and not right.

* * *

Jourdemayne's wards had tried to close the house off from him. Draco put his wand back in his pocket after he had dealt with them—certain cutting spells were classified as Dark because they destroyed defensive magic—and knocked firmly on her door.

Another ward tried to blast out of the door at him, but Draco flicked his wand and shut it down before it got too far. Then he waited, destroying the ones that tried to cut his kneecaps and stab him in the hip as well, until he heard footsteps getting closer on the other side of the door.

"What do you _want_?" Jourdemayne snarled, flinging it open. "I already told you that I showed the ritual diaries to—oh." She stopped when she saw him, staring.

Draco smiled at her and made a small circling motion with his hand, privately glad for this evidence that she _did _remember him. "Go on," he said. "I found your first sentence extremely interesting, and wish to hear more about it."

Jourdemayne darted her eyes around a few times, as though Draco would have six other Aurors standing to the sides, and then grabbed his arm and dragged him into the house. Draco let himself be pulled, but made a point of straightening his robes fussily the moment he was inside the door. Jourdemayne, who had turned away and started pacing around the house's entrance hall, her head bowed, didn't notice.

Draco sighed soundlessly. So much effort wasted today, and it wasn't even noon yet. "All right," he said. "You know more about this than I do. Start talking."

"I don't know what you mean," Jourdemayne muttered, head bowed. "You said that you would give me three days to think about it, or your partner did, and I don't want you to break your word."

Draco raised his eyebrows at the odd wording, but persisted. "Something else has arisen. Your pet twisted removed the memory of me from my partner's head, and apparently from the heads of most of the other Aurors I work with. I want a way to put it back. Since you're the one who knows the most about this woman, even if it is in writing that you haven't read in a while, you're going to help me."

He'd expected rage, maybe, or the same kind of helpless whimpering that Jourdemayne had done earlier when they'd confronted her with the notes. Instead, she turned towards him and lifted her wand in a smooth motion to point at his heart.

Draco's Auror instincts had taken over before he realized it, making him dive to the side as she tried to use the Blasting Curse on him. Draco rolled through the doorway of what looked like a storage room and glanced swiftly around. A closet on the far wall with its door open, but that would be a bad place to retreat to; there was no way out he could see. The door, pressed all the way back to the wall. Stacks of crates that, from the dusty, musty smell of them, might contain more ritual diaries, all stacked and arranged.

Draco rolled his eyes, smiled wryly, and dived between the crates, wedging his shoulders and his arse in when they wouldn't immediately fit. He burrowed as deep as he could and then crouched down.

He heard Jourdemayne's quick steps, and felt the hesitation. He didn't think it was feigned. He waited, counting heartbeats and listening for the sound of Jourdemayne's own breathing, which might tell him what she would do next.

"I think you misunderstood me," Jourdemayne said, and began to walk slowly to the left. "I only thought you might be in league with her when I fired the curse at you. I didn't want—I don't want to be trapped in here."

_I'm not fond of it, either, _Draco thought, and told himself to remember her words. At the moment, they might serve only as a distraction, but Jourdemayne didn't strike him as someone who had a great power of invention, or much dignity outside the specific Order she was a priestess of. She might speak something that was closer to the truth than she meant, unwittingly.

"Do come out," Jourdemayne said, and her voice had descended to that level where Draco thought she might be speaking to herself as much as him. "Can you doubt that I want to help you, now? Can you doubt that there might be something to the reason she did this?"

Draco nearly put his head around the crates at that, to demand what she knew about Nancy, but he heard the indrawn breath that so many people took before they cast nonverbal spells, and dived to the side instead. He heard the spell break open crates this time, and shook his head as he scrambled up. Perhaps she was only trying to eliminate his hiding places, but he was seriously starting to wonder if the Blasting Curse was the only offensive spell she knew.

He raised a Shield Charm in front of him as he jumped to the top of the next pile of containers—not as good as Harry's, but more than adequate, especially given the drilling they'd done together since being partnered—and then rode the crashing stack down to the floor. Jourdemayne's eyes widened as she saw them coming towards her, but she waited too long to decide whether to run for the door or just dodge.

Draco got to his feet immediately. Jourdemayne, buried under boxes of what looked like books, groaned feebly and didn't.

"Now," Draco whispered, kneeling on her chest and pointing his wand at her throat, "you're going to tell me what you did, what connection you have to Nancy, and the real reason that you tried to attack me."

Jourdemayne stared up at him, and then she shook her head and laughed. Draco didn't permit himself to flinch, because Malfoys didn't, but he did shiver. That was one of the strangest sounds he'd ever heard, rattling and rocky, as though Jourdemayne was close to choking to death.

"There's nothing you can do to me that's worse than what _she _will do," she whispered. "Nothing at all. And you have no idea about the full extent of her powers, about what happens when she makes someone else forget you. You might still retain some idea of _her_, especially if you have writing about her. But if she blots _you_ from someone else's mind? They'll ignore even writing that proves your existence. It's gone. It's dead. It's done. Accept that you can't solve this case and move on with your life, Malfoy."

"Not as long as my partner's in danger," Draco said. He didn't move or let Jourdemayne go. She was revealing more of an acquaintance with Nancy than he had actually suspected she had, and not claiming that she couldn't tell him because it was part of the "Order" this time. Wasn't _that _interesting? "Why did she decide to target me and not him? Do you know that?"

Jourdemayne laughed and laughed and laughed, the thready sound that made Draco's scalp creep. But he could play and win the waiting game with better opponents, and in the end, Jourdemayne closed her eyes and spoke in a flat, exhausted tone. "You should have thought of the way you behaved when you came to my house."

Draco waited, but apparently that was all she intended to say. Perhaps half-an-hour went by, and Draco thought she was in a fit or faint, from the way her eyes shut and the cold feeling of her cheek when he touched it.

Well, if she wasn't, she soon would be. Draco Stunned her and then rose to his feet, gathering her up in a Body-Bind and placing her inside a Disillusionment Charm. He took her wand, too, although he didn't know if it would do him much good. Then he Summoned the ritual diaries and shrank them to put inside a pocket.

The one good thing about Nancy having made his fellow Aurors forget him was that no one would suspect him in Jourdemayne's kidnapping.

And Draco knew a place he could take her where he would get _answers._ For a price, of course.

* * *

Harry was trying to suppress his scream of irritation. None of the Healers who had peered into his mind had said anything about the hole that Estillo claimed was there. They simply stared, and then clucked, and then went and fetched another Healer, who would do the same thing. By now, Harry thought he must have three-quarters of the Mind-Healers who worked for the Aurors concentrating on him alone.

_Just what I wanted. Attention._

He leaned against the wall of the common office that the Mind-Healers seemed to use for a gathering place in the Ministry and smiled tightly at the latest woman to approach him. She didn't smile back. She simply lifted her wand and Legilimized him, without speaking the spell around. Harry hoped that meant she was the best one and she could find out what was going on and he could get the fuck _out _of here.

Because he really didn't believe that he had lost the memory of an imaginary Malfoy who had been his partner for months. He thought he would feel different if that was the case. Lost. Alone. Glancing over to the side for someone who should be walking there and wasn't.

_Something._

"Yes, there is a hole," said the Mind-Healer, stepping back. Harry regarded her with more attention. It was the most words that any of them except Estillo had addressed to him since he stepped into the office. She was small, her head only coming up to his heart height, with pale brown hair pulled back in a severe bun that reminded him a bit of the way Hermione sometimes wore it to keep it from getting in her face. "I don't think it happened long ago. The edges of the wound feel recent."

"You think so, Matron Isral?" someone asked from the back. Harry saw the way they were all standing in ranks and staring at her, and decided they must have deliberately made this much of a fuss so that Matron Isral—obviously a person of some experience—would think it worth looking into.

That still didn't really do anything for his temper.

"Yes, I do," Isral said, with sharp, bobbing pecks of her head. "And I think that the only way to recover the memories is to lead Auror Potter to the Circle." She turned and started walking, apparently confident that Harry would follow.

"What is the Circle?" Harry asked, not raising his voice, but making himself very _present, _in the way that he sometimes did when he wanted people to shut up. The other Healers certainly did.

Isral looked back at him, face remote. "Something that will help you."

_Bloody Healers, _Harry thought, but he followed her. At least Estillo seemed to be coming with them, and she was the one who actually spoke to him like a human being. Maybe this would turn out to be a mistake after all.

* * *

Draco's mother said nothing when she opened the gates of the Manor; the wards had kept Draco outside the gardens. She simply looked at him, and then towards the spot where the invisible Jourdemayne floated. The wards would have told her there were two people here, even if she couldn't see one of them.

"I need your help," Draco said.

Narcissa met his eyes again. "And in return, you will pay us the price we demand?" she asked.

Draco half-lowered his head. Everything depended on the next few moments.

He caught her eyes. "Yes," he snarled, and tried to put the right tone in his voice, reluctance and denial and anger and interest, nuances that he didn't think she could sense but would want to.

"Yes," he said again.

And lied as he said it.


	10. Avoidance in the Circle

Thank you again for all the reviews!

_Chapter Ten—Avoidance In the Circle_

"This is the Circle."

"I could see that for myself, thanks," Harry said dryly, and waited a moment for his eyes to adjust. But even with the dim lighting in this particular room, he had seen enough to know why it was called the Circle.

This was a much larger room than he'd thought the Ministry would let the Mind-Healers have, considering that there weren't all that many of them. The walls were pure and polished stone, as was the case with most everything in the Ministry, but here they'd made no attempt to decorate them or do anything except flaunt it. A ring of braided metals, copper and iron and gold, was set into the floor. Harry thought he would recognize others if he continued looking. There were sparks of dancing color in the Circle, flashing when he narrowed his eyes or turned his head to the side.

Matron Isral didn't give him time to recognize them, though. She put a bony finger in the middle of his back and prodded him forwards, and ignored him when he glared at her.

"In you go," she said.

Harry bit his lip and tried not to take offense to the way she ordered him around. She probably did that with all her patients, and he seemed to have become one. And if there really was a hole in his memory, then he wanted it healed, although he still had no idea why someone would want to make one about a subject that seemed as ridiculous as this.

He stepped into the ring and felt the thrum of power come up through his bones. He shuddered a little. Someone had invested a lot of magic in the Circle, once upon a time, and what he felt was probably the dullest edge of what it was capable of. He made sure not to touch the metal, to walk more towards the center of the ring.

Then he turned around and faced Matron Isral, raising his eyebrows a little.

She aimed her wand at him. Harry's hand dropped to his wand before he could help himself, and she breathed out, "_Legilimens._"

Harry made a conscious effort to drop both kinds of barriers, the ones in his mind that might prevent the Legilimency and the defensive barrier of his magic that had promptly shimmered up and around him—

And the world inside him rocked, and shook, and splintered apart.

* * *

"You must tell me exactly what sort of help you expect with her."

Draco leaned back in the chair opposite his mother and sipped at his drink for a few moments before answering. His parents had obviously chosen a new wine in the years he had been gone, something light and fine that he didn't recognize immediately. He would not reveal his ignorance, but turned his head slowly to study the room that time and prejudice had stolen from him.

The furniture had not changed, nor had the fact that it was rigorously free of dust thanks to house-elves, but its position relative to the windows had. Draco found himself smiling thinly in appreciation of that. The fireplace had a new mantle, and there was new paper on the walls. Draco found himself wanting to examine it, to study the fringed flowers depicted there in more detail, but concentrated on keeping his eyes on his mother's and his fingers tight around the glass that he held. She would give him nothing at all if she thought him weak.

His mother just waited. Time had been kind to her, as Draco could see more clearly now without having the green flames of a Floo connection in the way. She wore her hair long, any silver in it so blended with the natural color that it was impossible to tell the difference, but caught back and up in a shining silver net. At her throat was the necklace of silver that she had worn when he saw her the other day. She studied him over the top of the wineglass as he regarded her, and with some of the same instincts.

Draco nodded at last. Jourdemayne had been deposited, under the Draught of Living Death, in a bedroom near the top of the house, and house-elves watched over her in case she did manage the impossible and awaken. Draco had to admire his parents' sense of style and thoroughness.

"I believe that she has discovered information relevant to one of my cases," he said. "And for my larger profit in life in general." No, it had not been his imagination, the way his mother's eyes narrowed when he said that she had something to do with his case, or the way that Narcissa's fingers relaxed when he said that he would get more profit out of this. _Careful, so careful. _His parents were still prejudiced against Aurors, then, and only making the best of a bad bargain by telling him that he could remain one when he was their heir once more. "Time travel."

His mother gave a delicate sigh and touched the rim of her glass to the center of her brow as though using the coolness and smoothness to soothe a headache. "You fell for that old line? Oh, Draco."

Draco sighed back at her. "As far as I know, she has truly discovered it. It might be the clue to some of the strangeness I've found on this case, such as a woman who can erase memories. I do not think that that apparent ability is what it seems on the surface. And Jourdemayne herself is very confident that that kind of time travel exists."

"Oh, it certainly does," Narcissa said, and sipped a little more. "Time travel in general, that is. But time travel without consequences does not."

Draco half-nodded. "I suspect that she is suffering from some of the consequences, notes from a future self that appear to plague her. But she will not tell me what they are. I need to understand what's going on to advance my standing in the Auror Department, arrest the woman I think she is protecting, and make sure that only I keep the secret."

"Speak in first person plural, dear, not singular," his mother said, catching his eye.

Draco smiled at her and bowed his head. "Sorry, Mother," he said. "You know that I haven't had much reason to do that in the last few years. _We _keep the secret, then."

Narcissa spent a few more moments gazing into the distance. Then she said, "And you will keep Auror Potter from learning of this discovery?"

_At the moment, I couldn't tell him if I wanted to. _But Draco would only admit that if he had to, such as if his parents contacted Harry and found out that Harry didn't remember him on their own. He gave a small, graceful shrug and a sigh. "I must. I agreed to pay the price that you wanted, and I know that is part of it."

His mother unexpectedly leaned forwards and laid a hand on his knee. "We do not want unhappiness for you from this decision, Draco," she said in a low voice. "We know that you must have paid your toll of that emotion and more these past seven years. We simply want you to—think about it. Imagine that you had your choice between your family and your future, and a limited, shut-in future that might involve you being in love with Harry Potter. Which one would you pick?"

Draco half-raised his eyebrows. It was, or would have been, once, unlike his mother to make such an admission. He decided that he could profitably test it. "From which perspective should I choose? Myself as I was seven years ago, or myself now?"

"As you were seven years ago, of course." His mother gave him a strange look. "Would you really expect to judge fairly from your position after that time of suffering?"

Draco pinned his lips shut to avoid snorting. _Of course. _His parents were prepared to offer him choices of a sort, but only in a way that made sense to them. And it didn't make sense to them that the person he might have become was one he was proud of.

Then again, if someone had asked him a few months ago, before he became partnered to Harry, if he would give up what he had to return to the Manor, he might have hesitated for a long time before he was sure of the answer. And then still be unsure.

"I will think about your words, Mother," he said, the same thing he had said so many times when he was an adolescent considering what would be best to do, and half-bowed his head. When he looked up, his mother had that faint smile that showed up more in her eyes and even the corners of her cheeks than her mouth.

"Let us see what we can convince our guest to tell us," she said, and set the wineglass aside to make her way upstairs, Draco close on her heels.

* * *

Harry opened his eyes. He felt as though he had just been flung through a large pane of glass, and he reached down and felt frantically for a second at his arms and legs, expecting them to be covered with a hundred bleeding cuts.

There was nothing there. So he turned to the Healers with his mouth open, already asking what in the hell they meant, making him feel these things.

There were no Healers, either. Beyond the edge of the metal ring in which he stood was simply a vast, flat glow. Harry could see shades of white in it, hints of gold, but nothing more important, nothing more colorful. No buildings, no people, no rooms.

_Matron Isral used Legilimency on you, remember? _he told himself, biting his tongue furiously against the temptation to cry out. _What you're seeing isn't real. It comes from the images that the magic is creating in your mind. The same way that Snape would make you see memories that weren't happening right then, they only passed through your mind because he was pulling on them._

But Harry still had no idea what memory this was supposed to be. Or lack of memory? Perhaps the hole in his mind looked this way.

Regardless, no one had appeared to tell him the way he should act or whether there was anything he could do to heal the hole. He stood with his arms folded, not moving from his position inside the Circle, and turned his head slowly in as many directions as he could from his position, observing everything.

Still nothing but a glow. Harry listened hard, but it was soundless and without echoes, too. He reckoned that he probably wouldn't have heard any sound if he'd spoken.

Then something appeared beyond the Circle, the middle of the glow parting like a door to disclose it. Harry took a single eager step forwards, then reminded himself that not everything he saw here was going to be kind. He dropped his wand into his hand with a small flick and stood steady, trying not to strain his eyes. What he saw would probably come closer in its own good time.

The figure took several steps, and then stood there at the very edge of the Circle, one hand reaching out as though the metal ring had a solid barrier of air or light above it, one it had to probe and touch.

Harry stared at him, and he stared back. The pointy angles of the face looked a little familiar, a little like the ones that he'd seen in Lucius Malfoy's face once upon a time. The shock of white-blond hair made something flicker in the back of his mind, reaching up like a plant's tendril towards the light—

And there it was, gone again. Harry growled under his breath and resisted the temptation to stamp his feet like a child.

"Who are you?" he asked, because the image seemed to have at least a little life of its own and therefore might be able to talk.

"My name is Draco."

Harry hesitated. Maybe the voice had made his blood leap and pulse more than it should have; maybe not. It was so hard to tell what might be real memories struggling to make an appearance and what might be just the hopes or fears or dreams of those memories he had.

"Draco what?" he asked at last, wondering if the things the image told him would match up with what the Healers had claimed. Of course, there was really no reason that they shouldn't, when the Healers had been the ones to open up his mind.

"Draco Malfoy." The figure leaned against the apparently solid air above the Circle now and stared at him. Yes, grey eyes, the way Harry remembered staring into above Lucius Malfoy's wand. In looks, there was no doubt that he might be who the Healers had claimed he was.

"And you were my partner," Harry said, glancing around again. Would there be a Healer here, to tell him if he was getting it right, or direct his thoughts back on track if they saw him getting off it? He had no idea, but he didn't think so. He would have to handle this on his own.

_Bloody Healers. They think you can heal someone by just putting him back in contact with the right person, sometimes._

"Yes," Draco said then, pulling Harry's reluctant attention back to him. "Auror partner. And partner in other things." He lowered his voice and gave a faint smile that made Harry's stomach tug and leap again.

"I—they didn't say that," Harry said, shaking his head and retreating a step from the edge of the Circle before he could stop himself. Then he locked his legs and refused to go any further. There were Healers watching him, there had to be if they had made this image of Draco appear in front of him, and they wouldn't get to accuse him of cowardice.

Although part of him thought he should be more worried about what the man in front of him thought than what the Healers did, which was ridiculous. He _had _to be only an image. Matron Isral had said that his memories were destroyed, and so had Mind-Healer Estillo. That meant there was nothing left to conjure this Draco out of.

"I'm saying it," Draco said, and raised his eyebrows in a way that Harry knew he must have found annoying more than once. "The knowledge isn't gone, you know. It's covered over, taken elsewhere, _put_—" For a moment, his right hand formed a claw shape and rose as though it would split open the air and drag the truth out. Then he exhaled hard and dropped it back to his side. "Anyway," he added, though Harry didn't think he had established the thrust of a coherent argument at all. "The knowledge is still here, if you can find it. It's connected to the twisted you were hunting."

At least that made sense. Harry did remember the Socrates Corps and the twisted he had pursued, and how to hunt them. "Do you think if I hunt her down, then I might get back the memories?"

"I don't know." Draco's smile twisted. "I'm a combination of the deep-reaching magic that Matron Isral is doing and your own memories and your desire to see me again."

"I have that?" Harry blinked. That was more startling, in some ways, than being told that he had lost memories in the first place.

And it filled him with a burning desire to have the memories _back_, because someone he wanted to see was precious.

"But I can tell you what your own mind advises," Draco said, drawing his attention again. He had his hands braced against the outside of that invisible wall now, and was leaning forwards with a face so serious that Harry took a step towards him in spite of himself. "It says that yes, you have to find her. I think—I think it would be best if you looked from the side, if you tried to find her by indirect means instead of direct ones."

Harry shook his head. "If she's this powerful, then the biggest problem is going to be finding her at all."

Draco made a soft noise of agreement, but didn't take his eyes off him. "Maybe. But you were thinking of going to interview Jourdemayne, weren't you?"

"Well, yes," Harry said, and tried to tell himself that this was part of Legilimency, finding out the impulses and secrets in one's mind and moving them around until they came to the fore. "She seems the logical choice, since at the moment she's the only lead I have who would know much at all about Nancy."

Draco gave him a twisted smile of the kind that Harry felt sure they had also disagreed over in the past. "Yes, you'd think so," he said. "But Jourdemayne refused to tell you the truth once before, and there's no reason to think she would start now. Go in a different direction. See if the Mind-Healers can help you break the grasp Nancy's power has on your mind if they approach it as something more than a destruction of memories."

Harry grimaced. "I have to stay around _them_?"

"I think that's something I do," Draco answered, in a soft, rich voice, as if talking to himself. "I think that I make you face what you don't want to face, and I'm definitely the one who encouraged you to start seeing a Healer in the first place." He paused and cocked his head as though studying Harry from an angle. "You don't take care of yourself the way you should, you know."

Harry just shook his head, too bewildered at the moment to argue. "I hate Healers," he said. "And they might already have done as much as they can by revealing the existence of the hole in my memories. If they've never run into someone like Nancy before, I doubt they can cure what she's done to me."

"I don't think it's her just destroying the memories," Draco said. "Or _I _wouldn't be here. As you thought, I couldn't come back, you couldn't see me, if I was totally destroyed, even in memory. There's something else going on."

Harry hesitated, then nodded, once. It wasn't as though he had any other leads at the moment beyond Jourdemayne, and if he had interviewed her once before with a partner, it could scare her off if he appeared without one.

Draco gave him a faint, pleased smile, and then began to fade, along with the flat glow that lit the landscape outside the Circle, until Harry was once again opening his eyes in the middle of a more normal-looking landscape. No, not even landscape, just the room where the Mind-Healers had brought him to the Circle once before.

And in his head was an image of Draco. He had no idea how accurate it was, compared to the real man, and part of his deep mind still whispered that the Mind-Healers might be tricking him. But he could hold onto it, and it didn't fade immediately, memory-altering magic or no memory-altering magic, which he thought was a good thing.

Matron Isral stepped up to the edge of the Circle and inspected Harry as gravely as though he was a summoned demon. "You will let us help you?" she asked in a soft, dry voice.

Harry clenched his fists once against his instinctive dislike of Healers, and then nodded. "I reckon so," he said.

* * *

When they stepped into the room where Jourdemayne was lying, Draco flicked his wand once to banish the Draught of Living Death from her system. It was a spell that not many Potions masters knew, let alone others, but, well, he had done his share of Dark study and of spells that he could use when he wanted a poison or potion out of someone in a hurry. It had even come in useful when he was partnered with Kellen Moonborn, before Harry, when one of their suspects had taken a swift-acting poison rather than surrender his secrets. Draco charming it out of him had put a stop to _that _nonsense.

_Before Harry._

Yes, that was the way that he thought of many things now, in relation to Harry. And it was not fair that Nancy had made Harry forget him and thus deprived Draco of even the possibility of a reciprocal relationship. He would make Harry remember, and he would make Harry think of himself in a different way.

And Draco in a different way, come to that.

Jourdemayne opened her eyes, and moaned, and blinked. For long moments, she stared blankly at Draco, so blankly that he wondered if he had done something to her brain by giving her such a large dose of the potion. Then she forced her eyes shut and turned her head away, shuddering frantically. Her skin visibly crawled and she raised her hands as if she would claw her way through the ropes that bound her. Draco moved closer, watching her carefully for some sign of an allergic reaction to the potion.

"Why did you do that?" she whispered. "Why did you—you couldn't have _known_. You couldn't have known what would happen when you brought me here. Tell me you didn't know."

"Many of the things that could happen to you have not happened yet." That was his mother, sitting back in her chair and watching with quiet interest that Draco thought would terrify the shit out of _him_, if he was a prisoner. "If you tell us what you know willingly, they never will."

Jourdemayne simply whimpered and bowed her head. "No one knows what I know," she moaned. "No one knows what's going to happen. But _I _do."

Draco flickered a glance at his mother, and saw her eyebrows rise. Although he thought she had believed him when he said Jourdemayne's Order had discovered time travel, it was one thing to say that and another to prove it. But this certainly _sounded _as though Jourdemayne had some means of gaining knowledge from the future, partial though it undoubtedly was.

"Tell us what's going to happen, then," said his mother, and leaned a little forwards, as if she would reach out and pat Jourdemayne on the head.

"No," Jourdemayne whispered. "That's the point, that you can't know that, you won't—"

And on it went, with Draco and Narcissa being as patient and as accommodating as they could, and Jourdemayne refusing to utter anything more than cryptic words and vague pronouncements. His mother stood up at last, raised her eyebrows at Draco, and stepped out of the room. He knew that she would summon one of the house-elves and order them to cook a certain food, of the kind that would go well with certain drugs and potions.

Draco shook his head as he looked at Jourdemayne. "You could make this simpler and earn yourself freedom by telling the truth," he said. "If you wanted to kill me, I know the secret must be important to you, but we could protect you from your enemies." Given the strength of the wards around the Manor, it was not an idle joke.

Jourdemayne twisted around to look at him, her face flushed and almost-fever streaked in the nest of her tangled hair. "It's not _me _who wants to kill you," she whispered.

Draco raised his brows. "And who tried to curse me? Your evil twin?"

Jourdemayne began to laugh hysterically, and couldn't stop. After several attempts at reasoning with her, Draco finally curled his lip and stepped out of the room. Frankly, he didn't think he would do much damage to Jourdemayne's mind, no matter which potion he inflicted on her. She adequately tortured herself without outside help, it seemed.


	11. Memories in the Gate

Thank you again for all the reviews!

_Chapter Eleven—Memories in the Gate_

"There are various ways that we can heal your mind."

"None of which, I notice, are actually doing it," Harry snapped, while keeping his elbows tucked in close to his sides and his eyes on the Healers around him. He still had the memory of Draco drumming faint and insistent behind his eyes if he closed them, but he didn't put it past the Healers to cast a spell that would deprive him even of that.

Matron Isral gave him a strong look. It had no emotion in it, but it made Harry pull in his elbows even more. "I wished to explain the procedure before I simply began it," she said, "with the idea of giving you some context for what would happen to you when we entered your mind. Must you be so difficult?"

Harry didn't duck his head and fuss with his fringe, because that would have meant giving her words too much credence. He just held her eyes and nodded. "Sorry."

Matron Isral nodded back and then appeared to at least jump ahead in her list, to Harry's pleasure, instead of discussing all the methods they could use and weren't going to. "The particular spell we have chosen requires _intense _cooperation. Between Mind-Healers, and with the patient, Auror Potter. You will need to lower your Occlumency barriers and allow us to look at everything within your mind."

Harry gave her a pleasant smile. "If a story about what I think shows up in the _Daily Prophet _next week, then should I sue you individually or collectively?"

"Every Mind-Healer here makes an oath about patient privacy," Isral said, and smiled back at him the way that Harry thought Voldemort would have smiled, if he was ever sane enough to find humor in a situation involving Harry. "If someone violates that trust for the _Prophet's _Galleons, I shall speak to her myself."

Harry just nodded. He wondered for a moment if this was how he would normally act, if this was the person he had become in the months that separated him from Lionel's death. If his memories were gone, would the person he was because of them cease to be? Or did a personality exist separately from a few memories here and there?

It was the kind of question Hermione would have been interested in, and probably could have spent hours talking with him about. It wasn't the kind that Harry had ever expected to concern him this closely. Dying and coming back to life had created all sorts of philosophical tangles for him if he really _thought _about it, but he didn't think about it, and in the rest of his life, he was mostly normal.

_As much as I can be._

"Since she knows you best, Mind-Healer Estillo will lead the expedition into your mind," Isral said briskly, and the woman who had brought him here in the first place moved forwards. Harry nodded to her. He didn't think it was because of any leftover memories, since he didn't seem to _have _any leftover memories, but he did find her non-threatening.

"Thank you, Harry," Estillo said, as though the nod had been an embrace, and then took a step back and cocked her head at Isral. She must have given some sort of sign that Harry didn't see, because Estillo drew her wand.

Around her, the other Mind-Healers drew their wands in concert. Harry tried to keep from flinching, and failed. In his world, such coordinated actions suggested enemies with a dangerous level of organization.

"Do not fear," Isral said, locking her eyes on his and obviously trying to make the words into an order.

Harry hated being accused of cowardice, and he hated orders. He stared challengingly at her and missed the moment when Estillo cast the spell that probed into his mind. He felt it as a delicate touch, the way that a hand rested on his shoulder at Lionel's funeral had been from anyone who touched him. Not even Ron and Hermione had wanted to come that close when they could sense the emotions that burned through Harry.

But he felt, like a punch, the spells that bound the Healers together into one strong entity who would move through his mind. He gasped as they poured through the room, cool, strong elastic bonds that linked hand to hand. All their wands gestured at the same moment.

_Which they managed just a few minutes ago. Is that the only effect it's going to have?_

But then the power shifted, and the flexible net gripped him and pulled, and Harry found the world falling away, drifting in the direction of a mind studded with memories like the night with stars.

* * *

"Our guest must be hungry."

In spite of all the ways and times and years that had intervened, and in spite of the fact that Draco knew she would be happy to use it as a weapon against him right now, he had to smile at his mother's voice when she rustled into the bedroom that held Jourdemayne. It was so _perfect. _Flawless silk over steel, where the metal could cut the silk and be in the open to wound at any time it wanted. People had courted invitations to his mother's parties and feared them at the same time, wondering when Narcissa would say something that would leave them bleeding internally for days.

"I'm not," said Jourdemayne, with her eyes closed and her face turned to the wall. Her forehead was covered with a sheen of sweat. Draco wondered for a moment if she might be sick, but the house-elves would have reported anything like that.

"You must be," Narcissa said, in the same disconcertingly gentle manner, as though her words could change reality. And they could, Draco thought, remembering faces that had paled and hands that had clenched. Narcissa drew a delicate stool towards herself and fussed for a moment with placing the platter of food, mostly containing a cake showered with flakes of coconut, precisely in its center. Then she stood back and smiled at Jourdemayne. "Come, my dear."

"Not hungry," Jourdemayne whispered, and dug into her blankets like a sulky child.

For a moment, Narcissa's face changed. Draco shuddered in spite of himself and moved a step away. Narcissa merely picked up the platter and carried it to the table beside Jourdemayne's bed, however, where she spent exactly the same amount of effort as before setting it in the middle. "I see, dear. However, where hunger cannot tempt you, politeness must prevail. We made this cake for you, and it would be discourteous not to try a piece."

Draco thought he could have read the threat in her voice if he was dying of disease. Jourdemayne either couldn't—which wouldn't surprise Draco; pretensions to pure blood wouldn't convey real breeding—or was too caught up in her own misery to try. She drove the heels of her palms into her eyes and whispered again, on a sharp exhale, "Not. Hungry."

"That doesn't matter," Narcissa said. "I am sure that your mother would wish us to know that she raised you with manners." She cut a slice of the cake, thick and tempting not-quite-chocolate under the film of coconut flakes. As she passed Draco, Draco cast a handful of the potion that would persuade Jourdemayne to speak among the coconut. In powdered form, the potion would taste and look no different.

Jourdemayne shivered, and curled up so that her face was entirely out of sight beneath the covers. "It's very kind of you," she said, in a voice that strained and cracked in the middle. "But I'm not hungry."

Narcissa sank down beside her and smoothed her hair from her brow with a tender touch. Draco felt an unexpected ache at the heart, and transformed it into an ache of amusement that, when they all knew what was going on and why they wanted Jourdemayne to eat the cake and what it would do to her, his mother still insisted on the importance of the charade. "Then why don't you lie there, you poor dear, and let me feed you? Just a piece." She dipped the fork into the slice of cake and sank it deep, then drew it back. Draco had to admit that his mouth watered when he saw the way the icing clung to the fork. He had missed many things during his exile from the Manor, but the cooking of his parents' house-elves was at the top of the list.

Jourdemayne tensed. Draco knew what she would do and tightened the bonds on her limbs in the moment before she tried to explode, so that her attempt to roll over and send the cake and his mother both flying turned into nothing more than a useless flopping of her arms.

His mother nodded at him, less appreciation for his quick wit than acceptance of a favor that she deemed her own, and then held the piece on the fork closer to Jourdemayne's mouth. "You will please me by eating," she said softly, as though pleasing her was an end in itself. Draco knew many, not all his father, who would have agreed.

Jourdemayne stared at her and said nothing. She was staring as intently as though her eyes alone would be enough to stop Narcissa from doing whatever she wanted, but her hands didn't move. To be fair, Draco wasn't entirely sure they could, any more.

"Open," Narcissa said, in the same coaxing tones that Draco remembered from his own childhood.

Jourdemayne half-closed her eyes and gave another of those hysterical laughs that she'd used earlier when Draco challenged her. Narcissa, though she perhaps could have, didn't dart her fork into the gaping mouth and stab it down. She kept it hovering instead, with an expression that made Draco's throat dry.

_Of course she doesn't think she needs to snatch any chance that comes her way. She'll wait for the best one, because snatching happens to other people._

"Why should I struggle?" Jourdemayne whispered. "Why does it matter? That's the bad part about knowing the future, you know," she said conversationally. "You become obsessed with it. You think you can prevent it, or you spend all night coming up with plans to make sure it never happens, but—I opened my door to you," she told Draco. "I fought you. I let myself be brought here, instead of killing myself to prevent it. Why did I do that?"

"I wouldn't know, I'm sure," Draco said in a drawl, standing with his arms folded and his gaze still. He wanted to know what she meant, burned with curiosity to know it behind his restrained façade, but he also didn't intend to let his mother know that he felt that way.

"Why?" Jourdemayne asked, and now she looked up at Narcissa with trembling lips, as if she was the young daughter of a pure-blood neighbor waiting to receive advice from her hand. "Please, can you tell me why?"

"Sometimes," Narcissa said, and stroked the crumbs of cake down Jourdemayne's cheek in a sensual gesture, "it's best to give in."

A cracked laugh escaped Jourdemayne's throat again, but she parted her lips, and Narcissa eased the cake into her mouth. Jourdemayne swallowed, half-closing her eyes.

"This is the way it begins," she whispered. "I thought it would taste worse, somehow. But—how was she to tell me? Given her first action."

Draco took a step towards the bed in spite of himself, in spite of knowing that there was no way that the potion could work this quickly and relax her inhibitions. He had chosen that way instead of Veritaserum, because Veritaserum inhibited the subject's emotions and made them recite everything in the same bland monotone. Draco wanted to see what was moving through Jourdemayne's mind at any given moment.

He was wondering now if it was worth it. If she was lost in the depths of madness, then any information she provided would be useless.

But his mother gave them both a smile, and then murmured, "You said that your Order studied time travel, my dear. Is that true?"

"Oh. Yes." Jourdemayne smiled, and there was a drowsy, sunny smile on her face, something Draco was aware of from the list of the potion's first common effects. He let some of the muscles in his legs relax. "And more than that. I was _High _Priestess, you know."

Draco narrowed his eyes. Given all Jourdemayne's seriousness and dignity when she spoke of her Order, her determination not to betray its secrets, perhaps he should have suspected that, but she still seemed unsuited for the role.

"How interesting," Narcissa said, her voice soft and her eyes liquid. "I want to hear _all about it, _dear."

Jourdemayne gave another of those soul-quaking laughs, and nodded. "You want to know," she said, "and I want to tell you."

* * *

Harry winced as they tugged him past yet another memory, this one showing the Dursleys engaged in one of their myriad celebrations of Dudley's birthday. How many were they going to look at? He accepted that the Healers had to hunt to find the mysterious "place" in which his image of Draco said the twisted had put his memories, but still.

They'd seen memories of his childhood, adulthood, partnership with Lionel, hunt to find the Horcruxes—that was one of the times that Harry hoped like hell the oath the Mind-Healers had supposedly sworn really was strong enough—and Auror career, but no memory that ever hinted Draco had existed. Harry reckoned that was because they were gone, that there was nothing they could do with empty places, but it still irritated him.

_How deeply involved in my life was he?_

Now things were changing, at last. Harry felt a resistance, a push back, against the Healers in his mind that had definitely not been there before. He hissed and reached up to touch the back of his neck, wondering if there was tension there he could smooth away. He had _tried _to be good so far, really he had, in holding back his Occlumency barriers and not hiding memories, but he might be nearing the limits of his tolerance.

"Hold steady," said Matron Isral, but Harry had no idea if she was saying it to him or not.

He forced his eyes open and looked around. The Healers were pressed around him in a circle, one that might have made Harry feel safe if he had feared outside attack. As it was, he felt his heart speed up to the point where he had to close his eyes again. Matron Isral's wand was a few inches from his face, tracing back and forth in the air like a dowsing rod.

He hadn't known she was that close. How much had the spell confused his senses, his perceptions? Most of the time, he would have reacted instinctively when someone tried to get that close to him with a wand.

Not this time.

"We have reached the limits of the spell," Matron Isral said, and Harry wanted to correct her and tell her it wasn't a spell, it was the Dark magic of Nancy's flaw, but he kept quiet and chewed his lip instead. "There will be—there will be—" For a moment, she closed her eyes, and her lips moved in something like prayer. Now Harry was watching her from under his eyelids again, and he wondered if she was incanting a spell he couldn't hear or an actual prayer.

He knew the answer when the air inside and through and under his head seemed to wrench sideways, and he found himself gasping for breath, falling through a space that was nevertheless still beneath his feet. The floor was moving—no, he was—no, the floor was. He shut his eyes and kept them shut, because he thought seeing the room dance right now was more than his stomach could bear.

"Hold steady," Matron Isral said, but Harry had no idea who she was talking to this time. "_Tempus confringo._"

The wrenching sensation happened again, and Harry screamed as the barrier broke.

* * *

"I was the one who chose what to study," Jourdemayne said, still gazing faithfully into Narcissa's eyes. She hadn't looked at Draco once since she began her confession. "I was the one who decided that we could travel in time based on my gifts as a Seer."

"That would make sense, that a Seer would have some control over time," Narcissa said, and her hand caressed the hair back from Jourdemayne's forehead with a control and gentleness that Draco couldn't help but envy. "I wonder—my dear, did you foresee where the Order's experiments would lead you?"

Jourdemayne shut her eyes, and her shoulders bowed as if she was trying to pull in wings "Yes."

Draco frowned. Something was wrong, he thought, something urgent. But Jourdemayne wasn't threatening his mother, and if she had tears running down her cheeks, well, the potion was supposed to deprive the person who took it of control over her emotions. Draco retreated a step towards the door anyway, glancing over his shoulder. A house-elf appeared in response to his silent command, and bobbed its head.

"I foresaw all of it," Jourdemayne whispered. "How she would come back, and who she would come _as. _The people who would try to capture her and change her. But I couldn't stop it. Any Seer knows that. When you see something with the force of a real prophecy, you might not know how it will come true, but you never doubt it will."

"So you can't use time travel to change the future, then?" Narcissa asked, but she didn't seem to need Jourdemayne's nod, rustling as it was against the pillows. "But you can travel to the future?"

"Not all of us," Jourdemayne whispered. "Just me. I thought that was because of my Seer's gift. I thought—how _wrong _I was." She fell silent, shivering, and her tears were flowing faster now, melting down her cheeks as if she was a glacier losing its ice in the summer sun. Draco flinched and drew his arms around his chest, and then wondered why. It wasn't like Jourdemayne had done anything particularly threatening.

"If not your gift, what was it?" Narcissa asked.

Jourdemayne opened her eyes, blinked, and began to speak rapidly in Spanish. At least, Draco thought it was Spanish, from some of the sounds. It was—it was a way of defeating the potion, he realized a moment later, with impatience and admiration commingling in him. Jourdemayne had finally gained enough self-control to realize what she was saying, and although the words still had to tumble from her lips, she could make them tumble in a different language.

Narcissa drew back, her eyes burning luminous. She touched her wand. "There are spells I could use," she said, gently. "I didn't use them because I wanted to give you a chance to talk freely. But if you would prefer…" She slid her wand out of her sleeve, and watched Jourdemayne's face.

Jourdemayne laughed, another of those laughs that made Draco think something had cracked in her brain. "The present joins the past," she said. "I should have known it. That was why she did it to you," she snapped at Draco. "Not him. Because _you _were the one she was afraid of."

"She was afraid of me?" Draco asked, shaking his head. "I didn't desire to capture her any more than my partner did."

"But," Jourdemayne said, and then turned her head and looked at Narcissa, as if she had the answer.

"I _would _answer my son's questions," Narcissa said, in a gentle, anxious tone, as if she was giving a girl good advice on her dress. "Otherwise, there are…well. I would hate for us to be on opposite sides, my dear."

Jourdemayne shook her head, but Draco didn't think that was the answer to his mother's question. Instead, Jourdemayne reached down and rubbed her bound hands as hard as she could against the bed.

"Trying to escape?" His mother carefully aimed the wand. "I can tell the potion is wearing off. You can have more cake, if you want."

"Saying farewell," Jourdemayne said. "I won't ever have this again." She stared into the distance, and shivered.

Draco opened his mouth to tell his mother to wait. There were things here that he didn't understand, and needed to, if he was going to make sure that Jourdemayne was telling them the whole truth.

But his mother spoke first, her voice a gentle tone that fell like a small bell into the waiting world, waiting for pain and who knew what else. "_Crucio_."

Draco jerked. He hadn't known his mother would risk one of the Unforgivable Curses, even behind wards. And again he wanted to open his mouth, to ask her to _wait, _to determine if this was really the best means of proceeding—

But he didn't have the chance, because the pain spell hit Jourdemayne, and she jerked and shrieked, and Narcissa gave a smile that Draco knew meant it would be worse than useless to ask her to stop now.

The pain went on for a minute. More than a minute. More than two minutes. Draco finally gritted his teeth. Jourdemayne couldn't speak until his mother lifted the spell, and Draco thought she had suffered more than enough to convince her that confession was the best option. He stepped forwards, opening his mouth to tell his mother that enough was enough.

And then Jourdemayne, the helpless woman on the bed, broke, and shivered, and seemed to _change _as if some great winged thing was leaping out of her skin—

And vanished.


	12. Time In Time

Thank you again for all the reviews!

_Chapter Twelve—Time In Time_

"What just happened?" It was a mark of how much the strange disappearance had shaken his mother that she asked a question Draco might take as a plea for reassurance. Even as Draco turned to look at her, she was pursing her mouth tight, her hands folding into one another as if she would call the question back and crush it like an insect.

"I don't know," Draco said, and faced the bed, staring down at the ropes. Even if Jourdemayne had suddenly acquired Nancy's ability to erase herself from their memories, or if Nancy had come in and erased her, the ropes should still have been around her body. Or else he and Narcissa wouldn't have been able to see them at all.

That what had just happened was connected with Nancy, he had no doubt at all. But he did not know how to prove it, or how to gather the knowledge he needed.

_I have to have Harry._

Draco shook his head slowly. In the end, he thought, it was need and not desire. Just as he had once needed his parents to support him, and without them he would not have lived, he needed Harry to complete the investigation.

That meant telling _someone _that Nancy had erased him from Harry's memory. And it could not be someone in the Socrates Corps, as he had seen this morning; Nancy had struck there as well.

"Draco."

He jerked his head up and turned. He had forgotten that beside him was one of his parents, someone who had long experience watching his face and might understand some of the conclusions he had come to without his ever explaining them. Now, she took a step closer and raised one hand as if she would trace her fingernail over his cheekbone.

Draco caught her wrist and held it at a distance in a delicately punishing grip. He didn't want to, he thought, but he didn't trust her. She could have poison on her nails, or even a grain of the crystallized potion he had used earlier. Draco had no instance in spilling his guts before his mother, literally or figuratively.

"What happened?" Narcissa asked, standing still in Draco's grip and managing to sound as though she was slightly bored.

Draco let his nostrils flare in response, and smiled. "You didn't _know_?" he asked, deciding that the wings of lies were the ones that would best spare him from the need to admit he didn't know himself right now. "You didn't _notice_?'

"I noticed what looked like something leaving our guest's body," Narcissa said coolly. Draco marveled that, under the circumstances, she would still refer to Jourdemayne as a guest and not a prisoner, but he knew that it took all sorts of people to make the world turn round, and some sorts had to be his parents. "Perhaps with wings—"

"The wings were what I meant." Draco leaned close enough to his mother that her eyelids flickered, although she still didn't move backwards. "You didn't see the way they spread. You didn't see the face she turned to us…?"

He let his voice trail off enticingly, and his mother followed the false trail laid down in the way Draco had hoped she would. Her face tightened. "A Veela."

Draco nodded. "It's possible that Jourdemayne has creature blood. That might account for her gifts as a Seer, perhaps even her ability to travel in time." He believed no such thing, of course, but it was a marvelous load of bollocks, and would keep his mother looking in the wrong direction for just long enough. He shook his head and stepped back, staring a moment longer at the empty bed, memorizing the position of the equally empty ropes. The exact memory might be important in the long run. "I know someone in the Ministry who owes me a favor, and might be able to check birth records."

"You came home so short a time ago, and now you are leaving us?" Narcissa moved a step closer again, her robes swaying around her ankles. "Draco, darling. I dislike that."

Which, of course, meant something more profound, and more dangerous. Draco looked at her, and smiled. "Mother," he said. "I made my choice. This is the last case I feel an obligation to solve. As you point out, Potter is—not as much to me as I thought he was, as I wanted to be to him. After this case, I will return. Surely a short-term sacrifice that results in a long-term gain is acceptable?"

It was one of the proverbs she had been most proud of when he first learned to repeat after her instructions. His mother frowned at him a moment more, then gave a small, soft smile and stepped back.

"As you will, Draco, darling," she said. "Only return soon. I expected your father back before now. When he returns, he will be sorry to have missed you."

The warning in her words lay as light and as deadly around his neck as a poisoned locket. Draco inclined his head once and then turned and made for the front door.

Harry couldn't remember him, but there were people who would, and who would, if necessary, translate his words to Harry and help convince him that this was real. Draco was thinking in particular of one special Healer.

* * *

Harry came so slowly back to himself that it was frightening. He felt pieces gathering, connecting, blooming, here a fragmented memory, there a scrap of words and light and noise. He opened his eyes unsure of what he would see or even if the sense of sight had returned to him, unsure of everything.

He found himself in the middle of the room that the Healers had stood in. No, wait, at first it looked like that. And then he saw the Circle beyond them, crowded up against one wall of the room, and that definitely wasn't real. In the chamber it occupied, it lay in the exact center.

"What's going on?" he croaked, once he convinced his dry tongue to work.

Matron Isral turned towards him and nodded, her face so remote that Harry winced back from her out of instinct. She either didn't notice or didn't care; Harry would have been willing to wager on the latter. "We're going to make sure that you can access your memories," she said. "There is the barrier." She pointed towards the far side of the room, opposite the fake Circle, a place Harry had instinctively faced away from.

He turned to look at it, and nearly lost his balance.

The barrier was enormous, reflective, and rippling slowly. It reared in place like a wave that had refused to break, and as Harry looked at it and shuddered, he could see touches of silver and steel in its colors, bubbles like foam along the tip, a wavy ripple at the base. He wondered if this twisted had somehow imprisoned his memories in water.

"We know the answer now," Matron Isral said, voice as harsh as a crow's, as happy. "We know that she put your memories beyond a barrier of time."

Harry stared. Then he said, "Excuse me?"

"It's the only thing that makes sense, given everything else she's done," Estillo said, stepping forwards from her place among the Healers. They were all concentrating together at once, eyes closed, and Harry suspected that he didn't want to disturb them. Estillo looked tired, and as if she would have liked to be back with the others, but she gave that comforting smile that had convinced Harry to trust her in the first place. "She split your memory into two different pasts. The vast majority of what you've experienced remained in the normal one, with you. The memories of your partner are in the other past." She nodded at the shining barrier.

"That's not possible," Harry said at last, his voice dragging and slow despite himself. "I mean—is it? Someone can't possibly—how can you make time pass differently inside someone's head like that, instead of the way it does outside?"

Estillo gave him a smile that was almost joyous. Harry had the impression that she was someone who enjoyed learning new things, the same way he had the impression that Draco was someone who had helped shape him in the months since Lionel's death, although he didn't have a true memory to go on in either case. "But don't we do that all the time?" she murmured. "Sometimes we live by the clock, and sometimes we don't. And sometimes we can think that time drags, and others that it passes fast."

Harry just shook his head and said nothing. He didn't know if this twisted was the most dangerous they had ever faced—

_That _you _ever faced. Draco isn't right here with you, now. _

But it felt that way. And he still didn't think he understood the limits of her flaw. Was it time travel, altering time for other people, or altering time for herself? Or perhaps it was all of them. No one had ever seriously settled down with twisted and explored whether all of them had a single Dark gift, or several shoved together.

Estillo turned to face the barrier, and Harry shook away the temptation to ask more questions. She looked as if she was going to need all her concentration, right now.

Estillo closed her eyes and struck out with her wand, and what felt, to Harry, like reaching tendrils of magic, although he couldn't see them. He heard her breathing quicken. Then her hair began to stream back from her head, as though she was facing into a strong wind that no one but her could feel.

Matron Isral said something, chanted something, strong and steady and sharp. Harry thought it was a spell, but he didn't recognize the words, and it was hard for him to take his eyes off Estillo at the moment, anyway.

Estillo took a single step forwards. The hair streamed back faster, and now her clothes were billowing, too. Harry looked at her wand and hand, and yes, they were still as steady as ever. He rubbed at his arms, where the ambient magic had made him break out in something worse, because deeper and more penetrating, than goosebumps.

Matron Isral's chanting wove around them all, and the other Healers began to pull together into a line, as they had done before when they were getting ready to follow Matron Isral into his mind. Harry wondered absently whether this was happening at all, or whether they were just someplace in his imagination, which he should have thought of before. What did the spell and what Esitllo was doing look like from the outside?

He caught a frown on Estillo's face, and stiffened. He didn't want to imagine what could cause that—

But immediately, of course, his mind reacted with all sorts of horrible images, so he might as well not have bothered trying to hold them back.

Then Estillo smiled, and her smile was the first thing that had made her look really familiar to Harry, instead of simply interested in his case or trying to be comforting.

"_Imperio_," she said softly.

The world trembled around them, and froze for a moment into a shining, perfect image, like an etching: the thin lines of Healer arms and robes and Estillo's outstretched wand, the curls of now-visible magic rising from her like a clumsy artist's depiction of water, the light and the darkness overlaid on each other in sharp shadows.

And then the world blasted apart, for the second time.

* * *

"You can't go in there."

Draco swallowed hard. Although exposure to his mother should already have proved to him that not _everyone _had been forced to forget him, it still made something grateful catch at his throat when the apprentice Healer in the outer office stood up to glare at him. He passed a smile on his face and said, "Actually, I think they would want to see me as soon as possible. I've been here as a patient of Healer Estillo's several times."

"Well, maybe you have," said the apprentice, who was glaring at him now with the petty, sullen look of someone who knew or thought he knew Draco and didn't intend to let him in anyway. "They're busy right now."

"I'll wait," Draco said evenly, although his impatience felt as though it would boil over like a kettle heated on a dragon's flank, and took a seat near the door, his legs neatly crossed and his face assuming the expression of boredom he had trained himself into in situations like this. Looking bored around Okazes and the like got you into appointments faster than looking eager.

The apprentice took the desk again, and continued to stare at him. "I'm not going to let you in on good behavior, you know," he said after a moment.

"I know that," Draco said, and smiled at him, and fastened his attention on the painting on the wall across from him, a quite good landscape.

He had just decided that the distant haze of blue in the back of the painting _was _meant to be mountains, after all, and not simply a dab of paint here and there, when the apprentice said, "Is your name Draco Malfoy?"

Draco heard the thin singing that sometimes presaged the need to move _quickly _in his ears, but didn't take his gaze off the painting for a long moment, before turning to the apprentice and blinking. "What? Yes, it is." His hand was on his wand already, comfort, long-established training, and his mind had catalogued the apprentice's age and rank as marked by the color of his robes, and thus the level of training he was likely to have in Healing spells that could hurt when reversed.

"Then I have a message here," said the apprentice, unfolding a piece of parchment with thick, clumsy fingers. Draco thought one of the finest moments of self-control in his life came when he simply sat and waited instead of leaping the desk to take it away from him. "Says that you're the only one allowed back there right now, that you're to come in as soon as you arrive." He grimaced. "But it's a ritual they're conducting right now, and you're _not to intrude._"

He said it as though Draco was a child who might not understand about taking one more sweet from the jar. Draco kept his face smooth as he inclined his head. "I see. Thank you."

"They have Auror Potter himself in there," said the apprentice, and pointed a finger at Draco. "Don't you interfere."

Draco kept his smile, but his steps quickened as he passed through the doors behind the desk, and into a cooler corridor where the doors of more private offices stood. These looked as if they would be the places where the Healers kept their private experiments and more confidential files, unlike the slightly public office where he and Harry usually met with Estillo.

He raised his wand and breathed out a tiny amount of power. If the ritual was going on as the apprentice had said, then he didn't want to use a spell that could disrupt it. "_Point Me,_" he whispered, and didn't even use the name. Harry's name was singing in his magic, in his body, aiming the spell already.

There was a flicker, light as a shadow, down the corridor. Draco walked that way, and _now _felt the magic pressing on his skin, building and building, as though they had reached the most important part of the ritual. He wouldn't have needed the apprentice's warning not to interfere, had he felt this at first.

Then something seemed to burst, the magic storming past Draco hard enough to sting tears from his eyes, and he heard Harry screaming.

Draco never asked himself what he should do next. He knew it. He lowered his head and began to run.

* * *

Harry felt the rush and the crash around him, he knew great waves were coming to sweep him from his feet, he heard the hiss and the snarl of the magic that made for him, like enemy serpents who didn't care that he could speak Parseltongue—

But he didn't know where he was, or what he was doing.

He hurled himself backwards and upwards, reacting the only way he could, as an Auror who was trained to fight. His wand trembled in his hand and felt as if it would fly away, but he didn't know that it would, and the Healers hadn't told him this would happen, and Harry needed the protection of something more than his fragile image of Draco right now. He cast a Shield Charm.

It appeared in front of him, familiar silver glimmer. Harry felt that he was standing on something solid, and he drew in a grateful breath, positioning his feet beneath him, ready to run if necessary.

Something joined the Shield Charm in front of him, something that wore white robes and stood with folded arms, facing away from him and towards the darkness where the threat had come from.

_Draco_. Harry knew it even without the sight of that unusual hair, Malfoy hair. He took a step forwards, wondering if he could reach through the Shield Charm and graze his hand down Draco's back. It wouldn't take long; he just had to—

And then another roar sounded from the darkness, not one that was inherently hostile but one like the sound of falling water, and Harry remembered what the barrier that had prevented him from access to his memory had looked like. He whirled to face it, and found himself spreading his arms before he thought about it.

The memories came falling all about him, and soaked him, and made the darkness wet with stars.

There was a Draco standing beside him, wearing Auror robes, wielding his wand against an enemy that Harry couldn't see but could _almost _remember. This one turned his head, and although Harry knew they weren't in the same moment, the offered smile still made him smile in return.

There was another stepping towards him with hands outstretched and desire in his eyes that made Harry think of Lionel, and then wonder if he should. He tried to reach back, but his hands struck the immaterial ones and slid through.

There was a third Draco who sat at a desk, or at least in the posture one would use for a desk, his head tilted down over invisible paperwork. He looked back and up and over his shoulder, apparently at a Harry who was part of his own time, and his face softened. Harry's mouth watered.

How could he have forgotten this, how much he wanted someone who wasn't Lionel? Someone who worked with him, who was part of his life, who wasn't a friend but more than a friend, a partner?

That was the point the Healers had been trying to make when they cast these particular spells, perhaps, Harry decided. The flaw that the twisted had used banished more than memories. It took emotions away, and those emotions crawled through time, and should have left traces behind them, brilliant flashes of the ones that were seared into the mind in a moment, sullen and glimmering trails for the ones that took time to burn. That the twisted could have removed all of them was unusual. Harry might not have remembered who Draco was, but when he saw his image, he should have remembered more of these feelings.

Unless the whole thing was taken away, and placed in another time.

Unless…

But his world was trembling again, and Harry had heard the roaring and crashing slow but not stop around him. He suspected that the moment was coming when he was about to be hit by the biggest part of the memory, the part that he should have known was coming, but which he had managed to fence away and forget about. He turned around, shivering, and found the wave poised above him.

The wave dived down. It took everything Harry was capable of to stand still and not move in that moment.

It crashed home, and soaked him with emotions, with memories, with tattered scraps of time flying so fast and so heavy that Harry screamed. Although he still didn't move, and let the broken, ravaged time run over him, let it do its work.

He had the impression that the chanting circle of Healers was around him again for a moment, and then that another barrier had broken that he hadn't been able to see, and then the memories ran through his head like waters breaking down a dam that held them back, and he was as he had been—

No. Broken, further. Tattered.

But _remembering._

* * *

Draco had expected wards on the door he was racing towards, but there were none. Or perhaps the Healers had expected him, in that weird way that Healers sometimes had—he shuddered as his mind brushed against the memories of Healer Alto—and had left the path to the ritual room open because they knew he would need to be able to enter.

He flung the door open, and saw something that ever afterwards he could never describe accurately.

But he did try, if only to make sense of it in his own mind. He saw a whirling tube of glass, of wind, bearing down from the ceiling to the floor, and in the center of it crouched Harry, his knees bleeding, his arms tucked around his head. He was screaming steadily, but more than that, he was _streaming, _faint colors cascading down his face and around his ears, faint trails of blood running from under his nails. The streams formed and reformed and vanished to be replaced by new ones. He was soaked.

Draco held himself back from rushing in. He thought he knew what this was.

And, well. If the reversal of Nancy's memory block was that violent, then it made it all the more imperative that they find and capture her.

He found someone staring at his back, and turned his head. The Healers were gathered behind him, in a circle. Draco found himself wondering how he had rushed through them and not noticed, but then dismissed that idea. He _knew _they hadn't been there a moment ago. It wasn't a matter of ignoring them; it was a matter of them being in one place and then in another.

Harry stopped screaming. Draco couldn't turn and look at him yet, though. He said to Healer Estillo, "What did you _do_?"

Estillo blinked and looked faintly surprised, as if she thought that Draco shouldn't have singled her out even though it made sense, as she was the Healer that both Harry and Draco knew. "Used the Imperius Curse to push against the barrier of time," she said. "I knew that he was resistant to that curse, from what he told me himself. And the process of the mind resisting the Imperius Curse is so hard, the reflex needed goes so deep, that I hoped it would push against and break the barrier on his memories as well."

"That is not the theory as it is commonly understood," said another woman beyond Estillo. "Perhaps I can excuse your unorthodoxy on the grounds of effectiveness, Estillo."

Draco turned away from them and took a step towards Harry. Then he had to stop, because he couldn't move, for the same reason that he hadn't been able to look at Harry a moment earlier. He _ached, _all over.

Harry was standing. He leaned on a walking stick he must have conjured without thinking about it; Draco had seen him do that sometimes, when he forgot about using magic as a tool or a self-conscious thing to make his life easier, and simply used it as an extension of his body. He stared at Draco.

There was—

"Draco," Harry whispered.

There was recognition there.

Draco took a step forwards, and clasped Harry's hand.


	13. Desire in Restraint

Thank you again for all the reviews!

_Chapter Thirteen—Desire in Restraint_

"What happened to you?"

Draco raised his head and smiled at Harry, a little helplessly. His fingers were wrapped around the cup of strong tea that one of the Healers—he thought it was Isral, the slightly frightening woman who seemed to control everything—had insisted he have, and he was leaning forwards on a table in one of the private offices he'd passed earlier. The Healer who owned it was nowhere in evidence, leaving the low chairs and lower tables and softly-blazing fireplace all to them.

He kept silent for a few minutes, studying Harry's face. Harry had exhausted-looking eyes. His hands twitched around his own cup of tea. He reached out now and then as though he wanted to touch, and drew his hand back as though he feared Draco's reaction if he did. His hadn't looked away from Draco or blinked much since they sat down.

"I'd rather discuss what happened to _you_ first," Draco said softly. "Did you feel something missing in your life?"

Harry paused in shaking his head. "I don't _know_," he said. "Thinking back to how it felt is strange, now. But I think I would have noticed something a lot sooner if she hadn't erased the memories of the other Socrates Aurors as well." He half-snorted. "Well, of course, that's why she did it. But she didn't know about Estillo, or thought we wouldn't meet her."

"We owe her a lot," Draco said simply, and plunged past that moment. "Harry. I missed you."

Harry glanced at him as though surprised by the hard tone in his voice, then dropped his head and flushed. "I—I know. I missed you, too. I didn't know how much until the memories returned, but I did." He finished the motion of his hand this time, and managed to grip Draco's fingers. Draco returned the clasp convulsively, and turned Harry's hand over to kiss the back.

He had planned to start his own story of capturing Jourdemayne and taking her to the Manor then, but Harry leaned over the table and continued the kiss, this time on Draco's lips. Draco put his hands up and pushed at Harry's shoulders only once. Then he went with it, and only broke the kiss to maneuver around the table and make sure they didn't spill their tea.

Harry leaned back in the chair, kissing him fervently as Draco half-collapsed on his lap, his hands sneaking behind him to cup Draco's back and arse, fingers rubbing up and down and trying to squirm beneath his clothes. Draco moaned as openly as he wanted to, knowing no one would hear, and wrapped his legs around Harry's waist.

Harry twisted his head and came up almost underneath Draco, his lips parting and his tongue sneaking out to catch his mouth. Draco moaned again, and nipped at Harry's mouth, holding it open for a kiss that went so deep _he _almost lost control of his breath, never mind Harry. They were both panting by the time that Harry pulled back.

"God, I missed you," Harry muttered, in a voice made rough with kissing, cradling Draco's face between his palms as he stared at him.

Draco caught his breath and licked Harry's fingers, but smiled and nodded when Harry pulled his hand back instead of letting him continue. "I felt the same way," he said. "Except worse, I think, because you didn't even _know _what you were missing, while I felt it all the time."

Harry tensed, and for a minute Draco was afraid that he would argue about that or start apologizing for something that wasn't his fault. Luckily, he seemed to remember he had a sense of humor, and smiled instead. "Well, now I know," he said. "And you were about to tell me what happened to bring you here."

Draco twisted to the side, ready to climb off Harry's lap and go back to his own chair, but Harry restrained him easily with Auror-heavy hands on his arse and waist. Draco cocked his head at him. Harry flushed, but had a determined smile on his face as he said, "Well, you can talk about what happened to you just as easily from here, can't you?"

"If that's the way you want to play it," Draco said, and leaned in, resting his back against Harry's chest and closing his eyes as welcome relaxation and warmth stole through him. "I went to Jourdemayne. I thought that if anyone could tell us about Nancy, it would be the woman who brought us into the case."

Harry nodded. "And she wasn't helpful?"

"She tried to kill me," Draco said quietly. "I captured her and brought her to the Manor. My plan was to have my parents help me question her. They would have demanded a price, of course—they _did_—but it was one I never intended to pay."

Harry shivered hard for a minute, and Draco could feel him repressing all the questions he wanted to ask, the ones that weren't immediately relevant at the moment. Draco twisted around and kissed him again, as a promise that they would address those questions later. Harry returned the kiss, hard and sloppy, before he linked his hands together over Draco's belly and asked, "How did that go?"

"My mother threatened her," Draco said. "She wasn't impressed. We fed her a potion that released her inhibitions and should have made her talk about whatever was passing through her mind at the moment. I think it did, but not in ways that we could understand." He frowned, trying again to think of a connecting thread between the various things Jourdemayne had babbled, and failing. "She was self-aware enough to say some of the things in a different language, anyway. And then she—vanished."

"The way that Nancy did?"

Draco shook his head. "My mother and I still remembered her. But she wasn't there anymore. I don't know what happened. There was a weird thing I remember seeing as she burst from the ropes, as if she were growing wings. I passed it off to my mother as a wild Veela and pretended I was going to the Ministry to look up birth records on Jourdemayne."

Harry frowned and leaned back, which caused so many interesting things to change under Draco that it took him a moment to concentrate on Harry's words. "What were the things she said to you? Can you remember them?"

Draco closed his eyes and took a moment of the discipline he'd had to impose on himself to get through the Auror program—where there were also plenty of distractions, though none as pleasant—to forget where he was sitting, and think back to what Jourdemayne had said.

"That she knew the future," he murmured. "That she was the High Priestess of her Order, and not merely a member. That _someone _had apparently warned her that things were going to fall out this way. She didn't name that person, but I'm almost sure it was Nancy."

Harry nodded, his hair rustling against Draco's cheek and tempting him to turn his head and take in a mouthful. He didn't, but it really _was _an effort of heroic self-control that restrained him, rather than good sense. "All right. That would make sense. What else?"

"That she was wrong about the reason she could travel in time," Draco murmured, eyes closed. "That she thought it was because of her Seer's gift, but she was wrong. She implied that other members of her Order didn't have the success she did."

Harry stiffened beneath him, and not in any way that Draco would have considered complimentary. He turned his head and opened his eyes, and saw Harry staring into the distance, as though he could see beyond the walls of the Healers' offices, his fingers curling into claws.

"Harry?" Draco whispered.

"Hush," Harry whispered back. "It's coming, I think. I think that—I might have an idea, if you'll be quiet for a moment and let me think. It needs time to form fully."

Draco raised an eyebrow, but leaned across the table and picked up his tea again, so he would have something to do with his hands while he waited.

* * *

Harry shut his eyes and leaned his head back against the chair, ignoring the way that Draco fit into his lap for the moment. It was very nice, and very distracting, of course, but he needed to think about Nancy instead.

Nancy could erase memories. They had accepted, without thinking, that that was her flaw. Of course, they had had hardly any chances to study her, and had to work with what they knew.

Draco shifted in his lap again, and reminded Harry of how much he would have liked to pin him to the table and kiss him some more. Or just hold him, running his hands up and down and letting his body do everything that it had wanted to for months, forgetting about the row he and Draco had been having before they fell victim to Nancy's manipulation…

No. He _did _want to do that to Draco, but they should wait at least a short time first and make sure that they had Nancy under control. He was sure Draco would agree, even as Draco shifted again to put the teacup down.

Well. _Reasonably _sure that Draco would agree.

Harry bit his lip and reminded himself that they would have plenty of time later to talk and do whatever they wanted, and yanked his mind back to the small thought that had been building when he asked Draco to remain silent for a bit.

Okay, yes. So Nancy's flaw wasn't what they thought it was. She didn't destroy memories, she didn't erase them, she sealed them behind a barrier of time. She reached in and twisted the perceptions of time in a human skull, which were always funny anyway. And she could do it for herself, and also other people. And she could do it to multiple people. It made sense that she had done it to both Harry and Draco where _she _was concerned, because they were the Aurors hunting her. And to Jourdemayne, because she wanted Jourdemayne to forget she had worked with her Order. But…

"Did Jourdemayne say anything about why Nancy went after you and not me?" he asked quietly, not opening his eyes. "I mean, why she decided to erase my memory of you instead of the other way around?"

Draco paused as if startled, and then said, "She did, actually. She strongly implied that it had something to do with the way that I behaved when we first visited Jourdemayne. Although I don't know why, given that I didn't see Nancy until the second time we were there, and she made me forget her immediately."

"_Ah_," Harry breathed.

And there it was. An insane idea, glittering in the middle of his head and incomplete in places, like one of those gem puzzles that he had seen Bill and Fleur's children playing with. He would have to talk it out with other people before he could complete it.

But he was sure, now, that it wasn't as simple as Nancy erasing her existence or others' from people's minds, and leaving them with no idea of how to fight her. Especially given the tugging that he had felt in the middle of the night, leading him to the Black house, before he had ever begun the case. He knew that she had made him forget someone else besides Draco on the tapestry, although of course he didn't know exactly who it was now. But what reason would she have to do that?

If she _knew _that they would be the ones working on the case. If her gift concerned time far more than it concerned memory, and she wanted to make sure it worked on him.

If she could see the future, and travel to it, and from it. If she _came _from it.

He sat up, nearly fast enough to dump Draco off his lap. But Draco rose to his feet independently of him, and stood looking down at Harry with his eyebrows raised, his head shaking slightly.

"What is it, then?" he asked, gripping Harry's chin and turning it back and forth while staring critically into his eyes, as if he thought that he might have to give Harry something for his vision. "What did you find out?"

Harry licked his lips. "Think about the way that we acted when we first visited Jourdemayne," he whispered. "_Both _of us. I chirped and cooed and acted sympathetic to her. You didn't."

Draco rolled his eyes. "Because I could see the mockery she was making of a pure-blood heritage she had no right to claim. Because I still thought, then, that the notes didn't come from a real twisted. I had no idea of Nancy's powers. Of course now I know she could have sent the notes from the future—"

"Notes in Jourdemayne's handwriting?" Harry raised his eyebrows.

Draco blinked, and fell silent. Then he said, "Yes, that was a detail I had forgotten. But there's still no _inherent _objection to that idea. If we're looking for one woman who can travel in time, then she might have taken Jourdemayne's notes to the future, and brought them back from there. Notes stolen from the back of Jourdemayne's ritual diaries, perhaps. If Nancy worked with her, she would have known where to find them."

Harry shook his head. "I don't think that's it," he said softly. "_Jourdemayne _was afraid of you, Draco. Whether because she knew that you saw through her pretensions or because you didn't react to her fear by trying to soothe her. _That _was the reason Nancy attacked you. But why should it matter to Nancy what Jourdemayne feared, if they were enemies?"

Draco stared at him. Then he said, "Something about this doesn't make sense. Do you have hold of an answer that does? It would explain, perhaps, where Jourdemayne is now, and how Nancy helped her escape."

"Jourdemayne didn't escape you," Harry said. "Nancy did."

Draco rolled his eyes again. "Yes, yes, I know that, but—"

"How great a coincidence would it be," Harry asked softly, the words falling out of him doused with the tingling certainty that he was right, "if we were dealing with _two _women who could see the future and travel in time when no one else in Jourdemayne's Order managed it? I think we're looking for one woman, Draco. Not two."

* * *

Draco stared at him. And then he leaped back and began to pace around the office, the thoughts flowing as fast through his head as they must have flowed through Harry's a moment before. Harry watched him with a hungry expression, apparently wanting to share in that flow, and Draco obliged him by speaking aloud.

"_That_," Draco breathed, "is why she cleared the Potions lab the way she did."

"I don't understand that part." Harry sat up with his hands folded in his lap, like an obedient student, but his voice vibrated.

"Because," Draco said, spinning around and pointing one finger, "we've seen one man become a twisted by drinking the blood of a twisted. _We _are the only Aurors in the Department who have experience with such a thing. She might have known that we, or at least I, would recognize the same sort of materials lying around as we found in Leah's Potions shop during the Alexander case."

Harry opened his mouth, then shut it. "I hadn't thought about that," he whispered. "I had thought that Jourdemayne became Nancy, that she _knew _she was going to become Nancy, but I hadn't thought about how. You think she did it with a potion?"

Draco smiled grimly. "I think she was trying to find out how to do it that way, at least, or perhaps keep herself from it. And think about it. Jourdemayne's sister was a twisted. We don't _know _that the ability runs in families, because there really aren't that many twisted we can study, but we know the ability to do wandless magic does. And what is being a twisted but the ability to perform Dark, powerful wandless magic of a specific kind?"

Harry shook his head, but Draco knew that he wasn't shaking it in disagreement, and was almost prepared when Harry stood up and came forwards to clasp his hands. "You're so _smart_," he whispered, bending close enough that he could have kissed Draco if he wanted, except that that would have prevented him from speaking.

"I wouldn't have figured it out if not for the brilliance that you came up with." Draco shrugged, and put his hand in Harry's hair, drawing him close for the kiss that he found himself hungry for. Harry moaned, and Draco thought about pinning him to the wall and finishing what they'd started earlier.

They really did have to finish this instead, though, so he drew back with a little sigh and said, "That doesn't explain everything. But it gives us a place to start."

Harry nodded, his eyes focused on the far wall. "And some of the things that Nancy said might even have been true," he whispered. "In the future, perhaps the blue-eyed twisted really did capture her, and she thought coming to me to seek help would be a good idea. But then she grew too nervous and took my memories of her away."

"And perhaps," Draco said, his mind surging along pathways that he thought Harry's might have followed already, "that's why we saw her disappear the way she did. The moment when she transformed—when she became a twisted—that was what my mother and I saw. And what she foresaw. She was acting awfully strange when we questioned her, not terrified of the potential pain but desperate in a different way. If she knew she was going to change into Nancy then and didn't see a way of preventing it…"

Harry nodded and clapped him on the shoulder. "She didn't want us finding out that she was Nancy, I'm certain," he said. "And it makes sense that she vanished. You couldn't see her any longer, and all she would have had to do was reach out and erase the memory of her appearance from your mother's mind."

Draco frowned. "I still don't understand exactly what we _did _see, though. Why that moment drove her to become Nancy, why we saw the wings that we thought we saw unfolding from her shoulders."

"I believe I can explain that."

Draco started, and whipped around, his hand on his wand so fast that it was hard even for him to believe he held it until he saw he did. Healer Estillo, standing against the door of the room, blinked and then stared mildly at them, shaking her head.

"I don't mean to threaten you," she said. "Even if I had ever had such mad ideas, seeing the way you fight would have cured me of them."

"Then what do you mean?" Draco hissed at her, and dropped his wand down to rest at his side. He was still thrumming with adrenaline, uncertain with it, and he stalked back towards Harry as he thought about the source of that strange reaction. Harry wrapped his arms around Draco's waist and kissed the back of his neck, as though he didn't have the same reaction.

_Oh, _Draco thought at last, his mind working through the ideas that should have been organized already. _Because I nearly lost Harry, and he nearly lost me, and we're a bit sensitive to anything that threatens that right now. _

He settled for putting his hand on top of Harry's elbow and giving Estillo a stern look, rather than explaining. If she knew what they were like, then it was her fault for surprising them.

"We have seen cases like this before," Estillo said quietly. "Some of those we treat are Seers, and their perceptions of time can drive them mad, or change their memories, or make time inside their heads function so strangely that Mind-Healers have to be specially trained to deal with it. I've worked with some of them myself. In fact, it was thinking that the woman who did this to you might be a Seer that gave me the idea for breaking through the barrier of time inside Auror Potter's head."

Harry nodded behind Draco, not incidentally bringing his head low enough that he could kiss the back of his neck again. "Good," he said. "So, what were you going to explain?"

"Minds, under great stress," Estillo said, voice going slightly distant as if she were reading from a textbook, "can change the body. And magical minds can change magical bodies more than Muggle ones manage. Sometimes, that leads to the growth of wings and other body parts that are unexpected. That is the source of many stories about those with the blood of magical creatures when the blood is not actually documented."

"But I don't think that my mother and I saw wings," Draco said forcefully, determined to get that point across. "I think we saw something _like _wings. It wasn't very clear, even given that the woman she transformed into was one that I couldn't remember."

Estillo nodded. "There are other changes that can be worked. Some wizards have made themselves into different people, under fear that they would be found and destroyed or hurt otherwise. And with Seers, who can come to see and fear the future…" She opened one hand as though letting grains of sand sift through her fingers. "Well. Fear of what one might become can sometimes drive one into becoming that thing."

"Yes," Harry whispered behind Draco. "It can."

Draco wanted to turn around and ask him what he meant, but Estillo was there, and Harry had a sound in his voice at the moment that made Draco think he might not welcome the question. So he focused on Estillo. "You think that she turned herself into Nancy because she saw that she would turn into Nancy?"

Estillo gave him a hard smile that made Draco remember she wasn't always gentle and understanding and kind; she had trained as a Mind-Healer, after all, and would have seen some hard things in the minds she investigated. "What were you doing to her when she changed, Auror Malfoy?"

Draco flushed, and only Harry's squeezing his waist kept him from retaliating. As it was, he managed to say, with immense dignity, "I wasn't the one who was doing it to her."

Estillo inclined her head in a way that told him she would accept that rebuke for now, but said, "Still. She may have feared revealing a secret to you, or feared the ways you would hurt her. Or both. But I think that is when she changed—a change that she had already foreseen, a change that she undergone in the future. And that future self came back to walk, and meddle, and change things. Perhaps to prevent herself from coming to be."

The pieces settled into Draco's mind, and made sense. From the soft sigh Harry uttered behind him, he thought that was happening to him, too.

"So, now," Estillo said, and bowed. "I understand that you want to decide how to capture and punish her. Please let us know how we can help." And she turned and left the office as quietly as she must have entered it.

That left Draco to blink, and Harry to lean his head against Draco's and murmur, "Yes. Capture a woman who can see the future and has removed herself from our minds and no longer exists in one form, and can probably make us forget each other any time she likes. Let's think about that."


	14. Intelligence in the Trap

Thank you again for all the reviews!

_Chapter Fourteen—Intelligence in the Trap_

"There's no way that we can know what she's going to do next."

Draco rolled his eyes at Harry's back and stood up with a slow stretch. He still felt as though he could have done with another twelve hours of sleep, but one night was the most he was going to get while they still had someone like Nancy to hunt. He moved up behind Harry's desk and bent over it. "We have to think about what we know of her as Jourdemayne, then," he said. "We know that she feared me, that she knew she would change in Malfoy Manor. Do you think she might go back there and ambush my parents?"

Harry turned around and raised his eyebrows. "Would you be sorry?"

Draco simply cocked his head and looked Harry in the eye. It felt better than he wanted to admit to have those green eyes look at him with recognition, but he wouldn't let that pleasure dictate his next actions. "They're still my parents, Harry."

"Of course they are." Harry passed his hand through the air in silent apology and glanced back at the notes in front of him. "I wonder if a trap at Jourdemayne's old house might not be better. And we can look around for any clues she might have missed when she was cleaning up her potions lab, too."

Draco thought through the implications of that, but had to admit that he really didn't have a better plan. "Let's hope that she doesn't come in. I don't know what would happen if she wounded one of us while we couldn't see her, but I'm not sure we would survive it."

"I may be able to work on something that would prevent that."

Draco turned his head and gave Harry a lightning stare that ought to have made him confess at once, or else boiled him alive. "You'll tell me what you mean by that," he said, when Harry just looked back at him innocently. "Or suffer."

"The perils of being in love with a Slytherin," Harry said, and went on before Draco could respond to either the insult or the compliment in his words. "I don't want to talk about it too much yet, but Estillo was able to open my memories of you with the Imperius Curse. What if I could break through the barriers in my mind that hide the memories of Nancy the same way?"

Draco shuddered despite himself. "I don't want to cast the Imperius Curse on you," he hissed. "And you'd need the help of a Mind-Healer. We don't have the time for it."

"If we went to catch Nancy, we may have to make the time," Harry said, but held up a hand when Draco started to lean insistently forwards. "Don't worry, Draco. We'll do it out of the Ministry, if we do it, in order to prevent you from being charged with an Unforgivable Curse. And I _promise _that I won't try to cast it on myself. For one thing, I would only resist it, and for another, I'm not eager to give them the chance to sack me, either."

Draco hesitated, but decided that promise was the best one he would get out of Harry. And it was true that Harry trying to cast the curse on himself would come to nothing, with his internal resistance. "Then I think we should go to Jourdemayne's house now. The longer we delay, the longer we give her to take away everything of importance."

Harry nodded and stood, gathering up a sheaf of notes in his own handwriting. Draco tried to catch a glimpse of them, but Harry smiled charmingly at him and slid the notes into his robe pocket, patting them. "Are you ready to go?"

In the end, Draco had little choice but to follow. He did watch Harry's back thoughtfully as they walked, though, wondering if Harry had gone back to risking his life for Draco the way he had during the first case, when the memories of his dead partner Lionel were still strong for him.

_If he intends that, then he'll have to learn better. That's all._

* * *

Harry tried not to touch the notes as they Apparated outside Jourdemayne's wards and moved closer to the house. He knew that they would worry Draco if he caught sight of them.

But he didn't need to worry. Harry was making several speculations based on what they knew of Nancy and what he "remembered" of his encounters with her flaw, but he was confident his plan would work.

But he had just got Draco back. The thought of losing him again so soon, even of risking him in battle with Nancy, which would probably happen, flooded his mouth with a sharp metallic taste and made him feel as if he was about to faint. He would let Draco fight at his side, he wouldn't consciously set up a situation where he had to step in front of Draco to take a curse, but he was going to protect him, all the same.

Draco opened Jourdemayne's front door with a hex that made the door crash back against the wall. Harry blinked at him, and Draco stared back with a stain of pink on his cheeks and muttered, "Well, someone could have been hiding behind it."

Harry reckoned that was true, but it still made him shake his head as he stepped into the house. He felt the difference at once. There was no reasoning presence here—or at least none they could detect—and the wards had begun to fade. When he listened, he couldn't make out the hum of magic from the lab and the room where they had spoken to Jourdemayne the other times they'd been here, either.

He took a step into that front room, and gaped.

The portraits and photographs that Jourdemayne had used to try and prove that she was a pure-blood (Harry was willing to trust Draco when he said that was their purpose) were gone. Bare wall hung in their place, and a large morning star made of dust was in the middle of the floor. Harry cast a Preserving Charm on it and then moved forwards, half-expecting to see ashes in the fireplace or the pictures piled in a corner. But they were gone.

"Draco?" he called. "Why would she have done this?"

Draco stepped into the room behind him, and Harry heard his breath come out sharply. "I didn't expect that," he murmured. "I thought she would have left them up and simply fled a house where she knew we would look for clues. But perhaps those portraits meant more to her than I thought." He fell silent, and Harry could feel his mind racing.

Harry left him to it, and began to look in the drawers. One was stuffed full of the notes that had tormented Jourdemayne, and Harry smiled at them sadly. Only now did he understand. Nancy probably _had _written them, but Nancy was Jourdemayne, and their handwriting didn't look substantially different.

He found a small notebook that he pulled out and began to look through idly. On the first page was a family tree that looked fairly accurate, as far as he could remember from the notes he had studied before they took this case. It listed Jourdemayne and her sister who had become a twisted as the only children of their recent generation. Her parents had died years ago.

The second page of the notebook, though, made Harry's lips dry out, because it showed the same general family line—a father with three siblings who hadn't married, a mother who was an only child, two sisters as the most recent children—but with different names. And with a different family name, for that matter. _Morningstar._

"Draco," he whispered, and turned around and held out the notebook. Draco came and took it, staring at it for a moment before he flipped back and forth between the two pages, and a dark spark came to life in his eyes.

"I didn't think about that," he murmured. "I assumed the morning star was simply Nancy's symbol as a twisted, but of course, she could have called herself that, and no one would have been around to dispute her." He slammed the notebook down on the desk, and his hands trembled. "She could see the future. She was constructing a fantasy of an ideal life."

"Or else she went further into the future than we knew, and those things _did _happen to her," Harry said, although it sounded like nonsense even as he said it. "Being captured by the blue-eyed twisted. Being hurt somehow by your family."

Draco sneered at him. "There's a limit to how much we should trust our memory of what she said," he snapped. "Remember that she's insane? And I don't care how far into the future she went, she wouldn't manage to resurrect her sister, who's a twisted and dead."

Harry nodded. After all, if Nancy really did have the ability to go far enough into the future to experience something like multiple days of captivity by the blue-eyed twisted, they probably didn't have a hope of capturing her. "Should we look at the Potions lab?" he asked. "If there's something that's going to help you, it might be there."

"I know that," Draco snapped again, and moved through the rest of the tattered room like a shadow. Harry followed him, trying to keep an eye on every corner and every broken and mislaid object left behind. Perhaps they couldn't see Nancy before she attacked, but they might see what effect she had on the world around her.

* * *

The Potions lab was even more bereft of materials and ingredients than before. Draco stood looking around from the door, then cast another charm that would keep a thin layer of air between his skin and anything on the floor or anything else he touched and ventured towards the shelves on the far back wall, which still contained full vials. Harry hovered behind him; he was far less confident in Potions labs.

_That's a Snape-induced phobia that he'll have to get over sooner or later, _Draco thought idly as he bent down to examine one of the vials on the shelves. The next instant, he stepped back and cast a charm that brought most of the air rushing out of his lungs.

"Draco?" Harry had stepped towards him, from the sound, his feet scraping sharply along the floor.

"It's all right," Draco said, although it wasn't really, keeping his gaze on the flask of volatile poison that he'd just found. When he looked up and down the shelves, he could see that most of them were poisons, of the kind that would kill in a few minutes. There was pure cobra and krait venom, mixtures containing nightshade and foxglove, and what looked, over and over again, like a purple-black, failed Draught of Peace. Someone without Professor Snape's training might not have recognized it. One started out with the Draught of Peace and ended up with a potion that would rot out the stomach of the one who consumed it, while sliding them into a serene state of shock that would keep most observers from realizing what had happened until it was too late.

"Why poisons?" Harry asked. He had come up beside Draco and had probably recognized at least one of the labels.

Draco shook his head for a moment. "I don't know. If she wanted to die, then you'd think that she could have swallowed any of these at any time and simply committed suicide that way."

"Could she?" Harry asked, his voice falling into a softer tone that reminded Draco of the way that werewolves growled before they charged. "I wonder. If she saw the future and the way she would change, doesn't that mean that she also had the ability to foresee how she was going to die?"

Draco blinked. Then he said, "I've never heard of a Seer on record who could See that. Their brains shut down from the trauma and they only know when it's near because they can't See a certain event that they should be able to."

"She's hardly normal," Harry said. "A Seer and a twisted who could travel in time, and she was one while she was the other. I don't know why she brewed all these poisons, but maybe it was kind of an exercise? She was hoping that she could escape her fate while she was certain that she wouldn't be able to?"

Draco felt a chill creep into his stomach as the edges of that lonely vision touched him. Continually brewing, continually watching the levels of poison in the vials rise, and knowing all the while that one wouldn't be able to make use of them.

"Perhaps," he said. "But we're still speculating, and we don't have much to go on, yet. For all we know, she's watching us from some corner of the house and laughing at our futile efforts to trap her."

"I don't _remember _her," Harry said, even more softly, "but from what I wrote down and what you know, I don't think she has much of a sense of humor. Jourdemayne didn't."

"Then where do you think she is?" Draco asked, exasperated, turning around and retreating from the shelf of poisons. He didn't like to think of Harry too close to it, even if he would probably be perfectly safe. "You understand her so well, you think you know, where _is _she?"

* * *

Harry took a slow, deep breath. This trod too close to the edges of his plan that he didn't want to tell Draco yet, but he knew that it was more important that they capture Nancy than that he get to execute his plan just as he liked.

"I think she's in Grimmauld Place," he said. "I felt a tugging to go there before this case began, the kind of magic that tries to tell me when someone is violating the ancestral wards and heirlooms, and it led me to the family tapestry. I think she erased my memory of someone from it, and of course I never noticed because I no longer remembered that person and we didn't know anything about Nancy."

Draco made an impatient noise, eyes fastened on Harry's face. "I think you said something about that once before," he muttered.

Harry nodded. "But I also wondered why she chose that place. She might have affected my mind simply to see if she could, because she knew I was one of the Aurors who'd be chasing her soon. But why someone from the tapestry? She must have gone there at least once, to look for the appropriate victim."

"And you think she's there now?" Draco cocked his head to the side, then shrugged. "I reckon it's no more impossible than her being here and hiding in a corner somewhere, snickering at us."

"No more impossible," Harry said. "And I think appropriate, in a lot of ways. The house is connected to your mother, who played a part in forcing her through the change she made. Connected to me, one of the Aurors who was hunting her. A secret, Dark, magical place, which probably contains a lot of the same kinds of artifacts that a twisted could value, or which perhaps could change someone _into _a twisted."

Draco stared at him. "Exactly what is in that house, and why haven't you cleaned it out?"

Harry laughed in spite of himself. "I don't know, and that's why I haven't cleaned it out. Do you want to go to Grimmauld Place and look, or not?"

* * *

Strange as the idea was, it was still the best lead that either of them had. Draco just made sure that he was keeping an eye on Harry's hands and wand as they Apparated. He had a plan of some sort, and not knowing what it was only made Draco twitchy.

The entrance hall that the door of the house swung open on was darker than Draco had thought it would be. When he reached out with his magical senses, he could feel that it was also Darker. He felt the thrum of blood curses, the hum of wards that had been sustained with sacrifice. That made him stay all the closer to Harry as they stepped into the house.

What he _couldn't _sense was any trace of Nancy. But they had always known that would be a disadvantage in this hunt.

Harry spent a moment looking up and down the entrance hall, and then nodded and put his mouth close to Draco's ear. Draco stifled the urge to laugh. They were working on the theory that Nancy was waiting for them here because she had foreseen that they would come after her, and they still cared that she might overhear them?

But instincts died hard, and so Draco listened to Harry when he whispered, "The family tapestry is upstairs. Keep your eyes on my back. I'll lead the way, and try to signal anything I see that's out of place, all right?"

"If you can even notice anything out of place," Draco whispered back. "You're hardly going to see footprints in the dust or a torn curtain if she doesn't want you to see it, are you?"

Harry grimaced, but stepped back and turned up the stairs without saying anything. Draco followed, watching the way his fingers fumbled in his pocket. He had taken a page of notes with him out of the office. If his plan was so complicated that he needed those notes to remember it, Draco thought, he more than likely wouldn't get a chance to put it into operation.

They rose slowly up the stairs. The steps creaked under them, of course, and dust came sifting down. Draco kept his eyes on the floor, trying to see if someone had made this journey before them, but of course he noticed nothing.

The stink of Dark magic grew worse as they stepped out into the upper corridor. Draco grimaced and shifted his shoulders. He badly wanted to take the chance to stop and cast a few protection charms, but he knew they probably wouldn't do anything about Nancy or any traps she might have set.

Harry halted in front of him and tilted his head like a hunting dog. Draco shuddered, his senses prickling and his mind telling him that they wouldn't get a glimpse of Nancy before she attacked no matter how cautious they were.

"This is close enough, I think," Harry said, and then turned around and held out his wand to Draco. Draco took it, but looked back and forth enough from his wand to his face to make it clear that he'd like an explanation.

"I want you to use that to cast Impierus on me," Harry said.

Which wasn't enough of an explanation, or was too much of one, Draco didn't know and didn't care. "_No_," he said savagely, and tried to thrust the wand back at Harry. He didn't take it, actually folding his hands behind his back and smiling at Draco. "Are you mad? I would still get in trouble for it, no matter whose wand it was, and you would resist it anyway."

Harry shook his head. He had the most maddening smile on his face, and Draco made a mental note to Stun him the next time he started smiling like that, instead of following him obediently along. "It's going to be my wand," he said. "And Hermione's told me that the wards on this house are some of the most powerful ones in England. No one's going to sense you casting an Unforgivable Curse behind them."

"You're _still _mad," Draco said, and tapped the wand against Harry's shoulder. When Harry refused to take it, he opened his hand and dropped it to the floor. "Why should I? What would it accomplish?"

"I need to reach the memories that Nancy's hiding," Harry said quietly, his voice charged. "The memories of the Black on the tapestry I forgot, whoever that is, and the memories of Nancy herself. I can't cast the Curse on myself without resisting it instinctively."

"Then the same problem applies to me—"

"No," Harry said softly. "Because I trust you more than I trust myself, and if the magic's not coming from my own core but from my own wand, I think I can relax enough to let you through." He bowed his head and waited.

Draco hesitated. Then he bent down and picked up the wand. "And you think that my ordering you to break through the barriers that guard your memories is all it's going to take to knock them down?" he asked.

"Yes," Harry said. "When someone accepts the Imperius Curse or doesn't have a choice about it, then someone can order them to do something that defies all accepted common sense and all their beliefs. There have been records of wizards performing extraordinary spells and feats of strength under it."

"Those were the files that you were looking at this morning," Draco muttered.

Harry nodded, and then focused his shining eyes on Draco and waited. The moment stretched out between them, the loudest thing Draco's breathing and the thrum of the Dark magic under his skin.

Then Draco cursed and lifted the wand. "_Imperio_," he whispered, the spell rolling off his tongue and striking Harry as though he was born to cast it, as though Harry was born to be under it.

* * *

Harry closed his eyes and subdued his immediate impulse as the curse rolled across him, which was to wave his hands and shout for help. He breathed deeply instead, letting the magic settle into his mind and grab and warp what it found there. He wanted to fight, because that was what he had done all his life, but with some effort, he managed to relax his muscles and tell himself it was all right, that he trusted the person doing this with his life.

And when he opened his eyes, Draco had realigned himself as the center of the universe.

He shone with a subtle light. Harry found himself staring, and knew that he wouldn't be able to look away unless Draco specifically told him to do it, because no order from someone who looked like this could be _wrong. _There was sunshine behind his eyes, and moonlight on his hands, and his fingers were pale and strong and Harry would have stood there while Draco strangled him.

"Can you hear me?" Draco asked, and his voice had echoes that Harry would never stop wanting to chase down the sounds of. But for now, Draco had asked him a question, and it was important to answer. He nodded, and kept nodding until Draco held out one hand.

"You can stop that," he said, and smiled. Harry obeyed because he must, and because he wanted to, and because he wanted to see that smile better.

For a long moment, Draco looked at him with sad eyes, as though he thought something was wrong with the order of the universe that said he was better than Harry and the one giving orders to him. Then he shook his head.

"I want you to break the barriers of time and remember what Nancy ordered you to forget," he said, his voice blurring with delicious accents along the sides. But Harry listened to them for only a moment before the order took hold.

He closed his eyes. He could feel the walls bursting in his head, flying apart, and the shards of memories came rushing back to him, and he nearly forgot Draco for a moment, swaying in the wake of what hit him.

Regulus, he remembered Regulus, how could he have forgotten him? Although Draco was so much more important right now, Harry still felt ashamed of having forgotten Regulus, because Draco had wanted him to remember, and he must have known about this long before Harry did.

And there was Nancy, the stringy long black hair and the expression of abject determination on her face…

And she did look like Jourdemayne, and Harry opened his eyes, determined to tell Draco, at least as determined as Nancy had been to tell him that ridiculous story about the blue-eyed twisted.

She stood in the doorway of the tapestry room, her hands out as though she needed the doorway to hold herself up. She opened her mouth when she saw him, but Harry never knew what she would have said.

He wrenched himself out of the Imperius Curse with a jar so hurtful it made him wail weakly, snatched his wand from Draco, and sprang directly at her.

If he could see her and Draco couldn't, at least he could make sure that _he _was the one squarely in harm's way.


	15. In Argument

Thank you again for all the reviews! This is the last chapter of _Writ on Water. _This story will be followed by a one-shot, "Evening Star," next Wednesday. Thank you for reading.

_Chapter Fifteen—In Argument_

There was a blur of confused movement. Draco felt as though someone had yanked a growing plant out by the roots, and the roots were in the soil of his mind. He swayed, and put out a hand to hold onto Harry, who was enchanted, under his Imperius, and Harry's wand was still in his hand, and they were connected—

And then they weren't, and Harry wasn't, and the Imperius was done, and he was springing towards someone Draco couldn't see.

And then it was blindingly obvious what had really happened, what kind of stupid scheme Harry had come up with, and Draco snarled and charged after him. He couldn't see Nancy, that was true, he was in more danger from her than Harry was, but he wasn't going to let Harry stupidly risk his life for him while he sat around with his thumb up his arse and no say in the matter.

* * *

Nancy made a throwing gesture, and Harry waited for the sensation like crumpling paper behind his eyes for a moment, for the loss of the new and old memories that he had recovered concerning her.

But nothing happened. Perhaps she couldn't use her flaw on someone who had broken through her powers once. Perhaps the Imperius Curse was still working in some way, and Harry had to obey Draco's order to remember.

He didn't know, and then he didn't have time to think about it, because he crashed into her and bore her backwards against the wall.

Nancy gave a thin wail. Her eyes were full of dark fire, and behind that fire wasn't rage, as Harry had thought there would be based on Draco's descriptions of the way that Jourdemayne had attacked him, but hopelessness. She reached out with stiff arms and pushed at Harry's shoulders, and her fingers curled around her wand, Jourdemayne's wand, as she began to incant a curse.

Harry lashed out and kicked her between her legs. That wasn't as effective for a woman as for a man, but it still got her attention, and she sagged in pain, panting, her head hanging. Harry punched her in the temple. If he could knock her unconscious, then he was sure she would be less dangerous.

But she melted through his hands like a soap bubble, and when he turned around, she was behind Draco, her wand pressed to his throat and her eyes fixed on Harry. She was trembling, but that made it all the worse. And from the way Draco stood still, it was also obvious that he had no idea what was really pinning him in place, that he could neither see nor hear her.

"You will tell him," Nancy said, with her voice wavering like a Muggle wire in a high wind, "that you are going to put down your wand and back away. When you do, I will let him go." She smiled, and Harry wished that he hadn't seen that smile. "My business is with you."

"Why?" Harry asked quietly. "I thought you feared him, or at least the person you used to be did. That was why you took my memory of him instead of the other way around, and fought him when he came to her house." He moved to the side, mostly by shifting his muscles rather than taking a step, wondering if he could make Nancy focus on him enough to give Draco a chance to do—something.

"Have you not figured it out yet?" Nancy whispered, with another unforgettable smile, and her voice steadied. "You're the one who kills me."

Harry watched her fingers, her face, her eyes. He needed to watch everything, and he needed to speak the right words, so that he could understand and make sure that another of his partners didn't die.

_Another of my partners that I love. That I'm in love with. I've acknowledged that much even to him. I have to save him._

"Then you know that trying to escape is useless," Harry said, and his voice didn't shudder and break with fear of what else she might have foreseen, such as that she killed Draco. "Why not simply surrender and come along? Perhaps you can still change the future. Perhaps everything you see isn't destined to happen."

Nancy closed her eyes for a moment, and Harry tensed to move. But she blinked them open too quickly for him to do anything. "No," she whispered. "My sight stops at the moment of my death. I know how I die. And it will be—it will be a relief, in so many ways."

Harry watched her, and wondered for a moment what it would be like knowing that you would become a twisted, that you would do it at a specific point in time, and that you would die and could do nothing to stop it. Then he put the sympathy aside. It would dull his aim, and he had to let Draco be all in all to him right now. If a twisted threatened to kill Draco, then he _was _going to try and hurt them, no matter how sorry he might want to feel for them.

No matter how much he might feel that he and Draco, and the other Socrates Aurors, were similar to them.

"But I don't know," Nancy said, voice dripping out like oil, "what happens beyond the moment of my death. I know that I am going to cast a certain curse. And I don't know if it lands." She smiled at Harry. He could remember now the way she'd looked when whispering to him about the blue-eyed twisted, and this was worse. "I wonder, what would you give to know _who _I cast the curse at?"

"I think that you don't have to do that at all," Harry said, and then he looked sideways in spite of his intention to keep his focus on Nancy. The expression on Draco's face made Harry shudder. _He can only hear my side of the conversation. He has no idea what she's saying. _He turned back to Nancy with all his muscles shuddering and decided that he _had _to concentrate on getting her away from Draco as soon as possible. "I think that you can drop your wand and walk away from this."

"I think that I can't," Nancy said. "I _know _that I can't. I've seen this for so long. I looked into the future for the first time after the night my sister died, and then I saw, and then I _knew_. Nothing I did could make the date hurry closer. Or the confrontation. Every step of this dance was planned out." A violent motion ran through her body, as though someone had jerked on strings that bound her shoulder. "I hate the planner."

_Keep her talking. _Harry put, too, from his mind, the thought of what Draco might think of the conversation. It would only distract him when he needed to think through every nuance. "Then rebel against him," he said. "Put the wand down. Come with me. We can try to make sure that you'll live."

"I see," Nancy whispered. "I know. I know every word that will come from your lips, and every one from mine. You think you can _change _this?"

Harry reached up and touched his fringe, pushing it slowly aside to reveal his scar. "I know what it's like to be subject to the future," he said. "To a prophecy. I think that you can work with that prophecy and still have chances that you never imagined, the way to resist it somehow and come out alive—"

He stopped when he heard an echo. Nancy was speaking the words in tandem with him, not even a step behind. She cocked her head and smiled.

"I know this moment," she said simply. "And the time when I die and I cast the curse is less than two minutes away now. I've been here before, and I measured it with a _Tempus _Charm from every possible angle."

Harry felt the slow, sick pounding of his heart when she admitted that, and had to clench his fists to keep from lashing out. It would do no good for him now, and probably wouldn't help him to resist or defeat her. But he needed to make sure, to make _absolutely _sure, that Draco knew that information, because it might mean that he could survive.

Which was of more importance than Harry's survival, frankly.

"Two minutes," he said, and Draco's eyes snapped and darted to him. "Two minutes until the end."

"I did tell you it was _less _than two," Nancy said, and her smile was thin. "And I know what you're doing, Auror Potter. It won't work. This was always destined, you and me." She paused. "A minute, now."

Harry wondered for a moment how he could fight someone who could see his every move, who had apparently studied his moves multiple times from all angles, if her tale of traveling here before and watching the struggle was true. And then he put that thought aside, where it could join the sympathy he _did _have for Nancy but which he wouldn't let interfere. Doing too much of this was doing the thinking on _her _terms. She might feel that she couldn't rebel and couldn't change anything, but Harry wouldn't yet accept that the same was true of him.

"Then I have to do anything I can to stop you," he said. "And it won't make a difference which spell I choose. Because you won't tell me?"

That last part was a question in spite of himself, and Nancy shook her head, her dark eyes fathomless. "If you had been able to help me," she said.

"But if everything is unchangeable," Harry began in frustration.

"Thirty seconds, now." Nancy's voice was soft. She kept her eyes locked on Harry's face, but her grip on the wand shifted, and Draco went back on his heels. He wouldn't know what was keeping him there because he couldn't actually feel the wand, Harry thought, but he would make a pretty good guess. "Good-bye, Auror Potter. I wish things could have been different, but I always knew they wouldn't actually be."

Harry told himself he wasn't making a choice—

And that he was. Just because Nancy foresaw what would be didn't mean that she also foresaw the reasons he had for making the choice. Inside his head, he was still free.

He cast.

* * *

Draco knew that there was a pressure at his throat holding him, but only because his head bent backwards and he found himself unable to move. He couldn't feel the wand. He couldn't see the person who held him, couldn't hear their replies. He only had Harry's side of the conversation to go on.

But thanks to the way that Harry had mentioned the timeline, he knew when it would happen, if not what.

And he was ready when Harry cast the charm that formed around him, a strengthened Shield Charm that would keep Draco safe from all sorts of magical attacks and also force someone away from him. He ducked and rolled, and the Shield Charm came with him, tumbling along like a glittering ball.

He looked up in time to see Harry cast another spell, one that burned across the air in a streak of purple lightning and earthed itself in, apparently, nothing, and another spell must have burst from the air and struck Harry.

Blood flew. Harry's head fell backwards, and he tumbled to the floor, his head hanging, his throat bleeding freely from the spell that had cut it.

Draco didn't hesitate. He cut a hole in the Shield Charm with a spell he had never told Harry he knew, and then made his hands into a scoop and hissed, "_Cruore conservo._"

The air between him and Harry turned transparent and thick, like glass, with streaks of red running down and through it. Draco didn't let himself think about Harry's cut throat in more than flickering flashes, didn't let himself think about the blood as more than material for his spell. He was powerful enough, magically, to do this, and Harry was still alive as long as the blood danced in response to Draco, which it was doing.

Draco closed his eyes and continued the chant, which was the initial incantation repeated over and over, and somewhere in the back of his mind, he was glad that it wasn't more complicated. The blood surging from Harry's throat listened to him, and hesitated, and turned on a slow, red pivot that he could see when he opened his eyes. The pivot splashed back down on Harry's throat, and nestled into the cut, and formed a shining mask that held the edges of the wound together. Draco spoke again and again, and still the blood rose and fell, and still there was more of it—when he used his wand to open a shallow cut in Harry's arm—to add to the sort of bandage that Draco was making.

Dark magic, of course, blood magic. Draco frankly didn't care. He kept his eyes on Harry and his mind on the present. The future could come later.

It seemed like a long time before the incantation froze when he tried to speak it, and he realized that he had no more flowing blood to use as a tool. Only then did he stand up and walk over to Harry, kneeling down. Harry lay there still as death, pale as death—no, that made a nonsensical comparison, at least to Draco's mind. Death was _red._

He touched Harry's throat, winced at the sound of crackling blood beneath his fingers, and pulled his hand back. "Harry," he said, and his voice was steady and controlled and a marvel of auditory engineering. "Can you hear me?"

Harry's eyelids fluttered rapidly, and then he turned his head. He tried to say something, but Draco shook his head. "Speaking would not be a good idea right now," he murmured. "I want you to blink once for yes, twice for no. Blink once if you understand."

Harry blinked once.

"Good," Draco said. "Are you sure that Nancy's dead?"

Blink. Draco smoothed his hand down Harry's cheek, closed his eyes, and let himself _think _the words, _He's going to live. He really is._

"Good," he said again. "Then I want you to think hard about this. Are you ready to be moved yet?" He opened his eyes in order to catch the hesitation, and then the two rapid blinks.

"The right answer, I think," Draco said, and stretched out on the floor next to Harry. "Think about _this, _now. Do you still believe that we need to let the twisted go and try as hard as we can to spare them?"

Harry stared at him, then rolled an eye towards what Draco assumed was Nancy's invisible body. Blink.

Draco shook his head and sighed. Perhaps this was the wrong thing to talk about when Harry was still inches away from death and he was giddy with the relief of saving him, but it was _something _to talk about. "She didn't kill anyone, I'll give you that, but not from lack of trying. And she caused us loss of time that could have been used to prevent some other twisted from killing people, if she'd admitted what she knew from the first time we visited her." Harry opened his mouth to argue. Draco looked at him evenly, and he shut it again. "And she made you forget me, and tried to kill you at the end. Those are crimes, although given the way that you tend to disvalue yourself, I can understand why they might not feel that way to you."

Harry tugged on Draco's arm, and then lifted his wand. Draco held his eyes, but Harry cast the spell nonverbally, although the way he turned pale a moment later made Draco resolve that he would limit Harry's magic during his recovery as much as possible.

The images formed slowly in midair, streaked with color the way that Draco's spell had been at first. He reckoned that probably came from Harry's weakness at the moment rather than the inherent magic of the spell. He saw an image of Nancy, holding the wand to his throat, and nodded. "A good picture," he said, finding that he needed to splay his hand flat on Harry's chest to reassure himself with the beat of his partner's heart. "But what exactly am I supposed to be looking at?"

Harry lifted one careful arm and pointed at her face. Draco leaned forwards. Perhaps Harry was pointing to the way her mouth moved as she spoke words that he couldn't hear, but he didn't think so. Knowing him, it was the despair in her eyes.

"I know that she saw things she couldn't change," Draco said. "But so do other Seers, every day. Most of them don't become time-traveling killers because of it."

Harry sighed and turned his head away. The blood on his throat crackled warningly. Draco shook his head. "At this point, I think we need to get you to the Mind-Healers. Not bringing you to them could cause more danger than moving you does." He cast Lightening Charms and then snaked his arms around Harry's body, lifting him and cradling him to his chest.

"You might as well," he said into Harry's hair, satisfied that Harry would hear him later if not now, "get used to the fact that I don't care as much about people like Nancy as I do about you."

Harry tried to grunt and say something, but Draco paid no attention to him as he walked towards the stairs. He had no fears about leaving Nancy's body. Harry could raise the wards, and they could come back for it—or Draco could—when he was satisfied that Harry was under care. The Mind-Healers were mostly experts with such things as Legilimency, yes, but they had also been trained in the most basic care of the human body, and they had no stupid bans like the one that St. Mungo's had issued against treating Harry.

Harry settled back against Draco's chest at last and closed his eyes. Draco was glad. Not only would it be better for him to relax and wait, but it gave Draco a chance to think about what they should do after the case.

He had several ideas.

* * *

Harry turned his head and opened his eyes. A young Mind-Healer, a woman he vaguely recognized from the circle that had helped him open his first memories of Nancy, bent over his bed and looked at him.

Her eyes were bright, depthless blue.

Harry groped for his wand, but the blue-eyed twisted shook his head and clucked his tongue. "I don't mean to hurt you," he said. "You've been useful to me so far, slaughtering the competition. But I will tell you this." He smiled. "You're poaching now. Be careful."

And then the blue eyes dimmed to ordinary human ones, and the young Healer said anxiously, "Auror Potter, are you all right? You look as though someone punched you in the gut, and that can't be healthy for you." She began to fuss with his blankets.

Harry let out his breath a little and shook his head. He knew it was useless to speak to her about what she remembered from the last few minutes; the victims of the blue-eyed twisted never remembered anything from the moments he possessed them. "Will you ask Auror Malfoy to come in here, please? He can't be far away."

"I'm right here."

Harry turned his head immediately, and reached out with one hand. Draco took it and pressed it to his lips, ignoring the breathless squeak from the Healer. His eyes were shadowed, but there was an intensity to them that made Harry glad he was lying down, because otherwise his legs might not have supported him.

"Can you leave us, please?" Draco asked, without taking his gaze from Harry. "There are things we need to discuss that aren't for the ears of Mind-Healers."

The young woman gaped at them, Harry could see from the corner of his eye. "He nearly _died,_" she said, voice loaded with frigid disapproval. "I think you really need to reconsider whether what you want to do away from the ears of Healers is _appropriate._"

_She thinks we want to fuck. _Harry could feel the heat stinging his ears, but Draco seemed more than willing to manipulate the Healer's perceptions if it would force her to leave them alone. He smiled. "I saved his life in the first place. I promise, I'm not going to do anything that puts him more at risk than he normally is." His gaze swung back to Harry, and his eyes sparked. "He does enough of that on his own."

Harry flushed and thought of denying it, but there was no point, really. After a moment, he glanced at the girl and nodded. "You can leave me alone with him. All we're going to do is talk."

The Mind-Healer kept frowning, but in the end, she swept out of the room with a sniff and a half-muttered comment about how it would be their own faults when Harry's wound opened again. Draco turned and sat down on the bed, staring deeply into Harry's eyes.

"The case is finished," he said quietly. "I compiled the reports and gave them the official cause of death, and we retrieved Nancy's body. Your wards like me enough to let me through, or else my Black blood did the trick." He raised his shoulders a little. "You don't have to worry about that. I managed to leave my parents' involvement out."

Harry nodded. "And you want to talk about what's going to happen next? Perhaps about what twisted we should rescue and which ones we shouldn't?"

"I think we need _time _to talk about it," Draco said. "Time we won't get if we go straight from your hospital bed into another case, which is what tends to happen." He raised his hand when Harry opened his mouth. "I'm not saying that that's all your fault, Harry. The Ministry works us hard, and I've gone along with that in the past. But for right now, I'd like to _enjoy _some time with you, not spend time worrying about you nearly dying."

"Draco," Harry began. He wanted to talk about a lot of things, Draco's parents and the blue-eyed twisted and Nancy's desperation, but he thought that wouldn't happen on the kind of holiday Draco appeared to be planning. They would talk about a lot of things then, sure, but they would be more personal and less part of their jobs. And Harry had just had an extended holiday from the Ministry; their superiors wouldn't be that keen on granting him another one.

"I saved your life," Draco hissed at him, and suddenly his hands were gripping Harry's shoulders much harder than had seemed possible so far. Harry winced and kept his eyes steadily on Draco's face. "You can think of this as me calling in in the life-debt and demanding that you adhere to it if you want, and you can explain it that way to Okazes and the rest of them. But I do _demand _that you come with me. That you take time to relax. That you do something other than simply land yourself in hospital—or the makeshifts that we've found since St. Mungo's banned you—time after time."

Harry blinked and stared. Then he reached out and laid his hand gently over Draco's, letting himself feel the strength in Draco's fingers, the tautness of his skin over tendon and bone, the way that Draco's hands rippled and then stilled.

"Whatever you want," he said softly. "I'll be happy to go with you."

* * *

Draco blinked. He had thought it would take a lot more resistance, a lot more arguing, than that, especially considering the way Harry had attempted to argue over Draco's treatment of twisted when he was so near death.

But perhaps that was the difference. They weren't in the middle of a case right now. They weren't near death. Draco was asking Harry to focus on _him_ in a way that didn't include protecting him from a murderer.

Harry had no choice but to think about it and admit that he'd like to go with Draco, without the distraction of something more "important."

There would be enough consequences from this case to compare to the ashfall from a volcanic explosion, Draco knew. The Ministry was satisfied with his explanations right now, but wouldn't be forever. There were his parents still waiting on the horizon, and Harry's moral compassion, and the fact that the blue-eyed twisted was hunting them, and the people who might disapprove of them beginning a relationship.

But those things weren't equally important all the time. And perhaps, for right now, he and Harry could have what Draco had wanted in the first place: the time and space to concentrate on each other, the ability to speak.

The ability to remember each other, and stabilize their lives, and think about companionship—and even love—in a way that didn't vault them from moment to moment of danger and forbid ordinary declarations.

He bent down and kissed Harry, long and slow enough to make Harry gasp and arch his neck to get more of that, his hands massaging long strips of deliciousness into Harry's shoulders. When Harry began to stretch the delicate spellwork on his throat to kiss back, Draco pulled away and shook his head.

"You should get your sleep," he murmured, and laid his hand on Harry's, to show that he had no intention of leaving him alone while he took it.

Harry fell asleep smiling, and Draco watched over him.

**The End.**


End file.
